


Antediluvian

by Kizmet



Series: Tear Me Down [9]
Category: Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist
Genre: Biblical References, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, F/M, M/M, Sexual Slavery, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-04-27
Packaged: 2018-05-24 19:41:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6164413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mephisto take up telling the history of the Reflected Worlds from where Satan left off.  “When the oaths work on you unaware, you are nothing more than   clay in a potter’s hands.  When you look in the mirror and see what you’ve been shaped into you’ll believe that the gargoyle staring back at you was always you.”  And he would known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The City

_“What is the origin of evil? That is what you wish to know? Was it the desire for knowledge? A flaw in Satan’s programing? Something innate to the human condition? Was it the existence of temptation? Unequal distribution of goods, talent, favor or grains of sand inspiring jealousy?” Mephisto laughed softly. “No, what you wish to know is if demons brought forth evil or if evil brought forth demons._

_“I can only tell you what I saw of the Reflected Worlds’ earliest history, and back then, my perspective was quite narrow._

_“I was born after the Fall of Man, so I can’t honestly say I grew up in paradise, however, compared to the rest of Assiah.... The Eldest had recalled the angels still loyal to him to Gehenna to aid in stretching his resources to cope with the ever increasing human population. The amenities that had been offered before Mother’s invitation went out were gone. Most of the world had suddenly become a very cold and harsh place in which humanity had to struggle to survive. But not for us. My parents’ generation was composed of angels who had refused the Eldest’s call and their human soulmates who made that possible. The Nephilim benefited both from Mother’s technology, built from the memories she’d recovered of the world beyond the Void and Father’s blue flames with which she powered her devices._

_“I admit, it wasn’t perfect. Mother died of giving birth to Lucifer and I and Father left, unable to stand the sight of us. But their contributions to our society remained. Lucifer troubled himself over Father’s abandonment of his sons much more than I did, I never did understand why. Father clearly didn’t care about us so, in return, I refused to care about him._

_“I was the beloved prince of the most prosperous City-State known to the Antediluvian world. Ignoring my immediate family, those around me catered to my every whim. I had anything and everything I wanted. Although, I may only remember my childhood as perfectly idyllic because it’s end was so abrupt and brutal._

* * *

In a secluded niche, several dozen feet up the shear wall of ravine over-looking the narrow entrance to a secluded mountain valley a youth with dark purple hair lay back idly watching the clouds roll by. A girl curled up at his side, her dark red hair fanned across his shoulder as she drew lazy circles on the skin of his stomach with a lavender finger. She glanced toward the narrow pass that connected the valley to the outside world, “Do you ever wonder about what’s out there?” 

The boy snorted. “Unwashed barbarians still living in tents with their sheep because they believe the desire for knowledge is the source of all evil,” he said.

“Maybe they’ve changed,” the girl said. “The ones that leave never come back. Maybe they’ve surpassed us and we never noticed, hiding here in our little enclave all smug and self-satisfied.”

“Or maybe they never come back because the barbarians murder them,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t let your curiosity get away from you Naamah. Afterall, you can’t even pass for human,” and there were fewer born every decade who could. “What would you do if they decided to take offense because you Grandfather got sick of serving them and left?”

Before the girl could reply a strident voice drifted up from the valley floor. “Samael!”

The boy rolled his eyes, “Here comes Mr. Perfect, we’d best get dressed or his head’ll explode.”

“Oh, be nice to your brother,” the girl snickered. “We should pity him for having no notion of how to have fun rather than mocking him.”

A few minutes later a blonde boy jogged up the trail. “Samael! You skipped your classes!” he declared frowning sternly at the other boy.

“I told Paimon to find a tutor who doesn’t bore me to death if he doesn’t want me to skip,” Samael replied. He grinned down at the girl. “Naamah, unlike his tutors, is not boring.” 

“You were needed!” Lucifer exclaimed. He hesitated for a moment then lowered his voice. “There’s been a killing.” 

Naamah gasped. 

“Who-” Samael asked.

“Lamech. He’s been practically bragging about it, so there’s no question about guilt but since he’s of Mother’s blood Paimon wants us there for the sentencing. So there’s no question about who’s the rightful power either, even if Paimon is just Father’s stand-in. Which is why everyone’s been searching for you for hours!”

“Who’s dead?” Samael finished his question.

Lucifer shrugged. “The trial’s barely an hour off now so get a move on it and get into your ceremonial garb.” 

Samael lept off the edge of the cliff landing neatly on the valley floor below. Naamah and Lucifer quickly followed suit. The three adolescents raced up the ravine, in a few moments it opened up to reveal the valley proper and the City. 

The City was the dreams of a lost world brought to life. Narrow spires of glistening crystal rose hundreds of feet into the air. Light from the sinking sun was captured by their faucets and reflected back in a mirade of colors. Patches of bioluminescent plants grew along the streets and would light the way for pedestrians once night fell. Underneath the City, Samael knew there was a generator, built by his mother, that held a piece of his father’s blue fire and powered it all. 

As they approached the central tower Naamah split off for her own home while Lucifer led his brother around to a side entrance. “No reason to make it obvious you were playing truant,” he murmured as they slipped up the back stair to their rooms. Samael took a moment to clean up then pulled on a high-necked purple tunic. Lucifer was waiting in the halls, wearing a gold wrap that left him bare to the waist revealing the faint scars where his wings had been removed at birth. “Show some respect,” Lucifer said, frowning at Samael’s choice of clothes.

“I am,” the darker of the brothers replied. “I’m respecting those who chose to sacrifice their wings by not pretending to be one of them.”

“They did it as a show of respect for Father. You hide your scars to avoid doing the same.”

“It’s nice how things works out,” Samael replied sardonically. “I can manage to simultaneously show my respect for those who’ve earned it and withhold it from someone who hasn’t. Not that he cares, I haven’t even seen our illustrious father in years. What’s Paimon’s plan?”

“Lamech isn’t arguing his guilt, just our right to punish him for it,” Lucifer replied as they walked downstairs to the audience chamber that filled the central tower’s first floor. “Paimon can’t let him stay.” 

“Where were you?” Paimon asked quietly as he met the brothers at the door. 

“If I’d known my great-great-grandnephew was going to go crazy today I would have stayed closer,” Samael replied irritably. “Lucifer told me enough of the plan. Why did you ever let great-great grandfather come here?”

“Because your mother loved him regardless of what he’d done,” Paimon said. “Now we have to deal with this.” He squared his shoulders, standing straight his horns nearly scraped the door as he passed through. Samael and Lucifer flanked him, both of them let their faces go impassive as they ascended the three steps to the diaz at the front of the room.

Lamech’s two wives, Adah and Zillah stood together at one side of the room. Adah appeared human, but Zillah’s body was covered in powder blue scales. Like Lucifer, Zillah’s wrap left her shoulders bare to show the scars from where her wings had been cut off. After a moment Lamech was brought in He was a stout man with greying hair at his temples. The two men who’d escorted him remained acting as guards. “Could you repeat what you told us earlier?” Paimon asked the two women.

“Zillah doesn’t want to speak of what he said, but I will,” Adah said. 

Samael frowned at that, studying Zillah more closely. All the first generation humans were gone now, stolen away by time and the Eldest’s decree that humans would grow infirm and eventually die. However, the definition of a first generation human varied, it could mean those humans made not born or it could mean those who’d come here to found the City alongside the rebelling angels. Samael’s mother had been one of the former, her body still had the channels the angels had used to restore humans from the days before death. In open defiance of the Eldest’s will, Satan had extended her lifetime far beyond what it should have been but in the end all of Satan’s power and defiance hadn’t been enough to override the inevitability of his human soulmate’s death. Zillah’s first husband had been the latter sort. She had arrived at the nascent City with Lamech’s great-grandfather who was Cain’s grandson. All humans born lacked the channels to be restored by the angels’ energy and Irad had died long before Samael and Lucifer, his great uncles, were even born. In fact, Lamech’s father had been born only a few years after Samael and Lucifer but his blood ran mostly human and while Lamech was a grown man, his great-great-granduncles were still adolescents. 

As the first generation humans had passed away all of the rebelling angels had been left to struggle with the loss of their other half. With Eve’s death, Satan had largely abandoned the City the two of them had founded and the children they’d created between them to search the world endlessly for his beloved’s reincarnation. Samael couldn’t remember a conversation with his father that hadn’t included the wish he’d never been born. Zillah had, apparently, picked a diametrically opposite means of dealing with her soulmate’s loss. From what Samael could guess it seemed that she had transferred her bonds to her, or more pointedly, to her lover’s descendents. Although looking at the way she clasped Adah’s arm Samael wondered if maybe she hadn’t transferred her affections somewhere else entirely.

“He told us that Kenec had insulted him and his forebearers and so he smashed his head in with a stone, just like his great-great-great-grandfather,” Adah gave her husband a distasteful look. “Every year it seems he gets more obsessed with that murderer, I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”

“Zillah, can you confirm what has been said?” Paimon asked. 

“I won’t speak against my husband,” Zillah replied. Then halting she added, “But I will say that my sister-wife has never been a liar.” 

“Yes, I killed him, what does it matter?” Lamech announced boredly. “What are you going to do? If harm to Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech will be avenged seventy-seven times. So can we move this waste of my time along?”

Samael rolled his eyes, “Says who? This whole city was built on the foundation of not giving a damn what the Eldest thought or said. I know the story: My mother, despite all her wondrous qualities, loved her first two sons to the point of having a massive blind spot and so when one of them took it into his head to murder the other she blamed the Eldest for making Cain jealous. But if you want to look at things more broadly that wasn’t the first time the Eldest played favorites: Humans were precious, to be cared for. Angels were the ones made to do the caring. Now look around you and what do you see?”

Paimon took Samael’s lead. “We could have lashed out at the favored son, as Cain did. Instead we turned our backs on the one who saw us as the lesser sibling and built our own civilization here. Now you, Lamech have brought a murderer among us for a second time. We tolerated Cain’s presence out of respect for his mother’s wishes more than from fear of the Eldest. You have neither protecting you and it is not the Eldest’s favorite you’ve wronged but one of us.”

“We want to rid ourselves of him,” Lucifer stated. “But do we want more blood shed on his account? We took the other world’s murderer, why can’t they have ours?”

“And if we’re all lucky he’ll die of malnutrition or exposure or whatever else it is that plagues the outside world at the moment,” Samael added.

Several days later as they watched a resentful Lamech stomp out of the valley with only what he could fit into the pack on his back Paimon commented, “If he lives long enough to tell his version of the story, it’ll be his ancestor who built the City and the rest of us will be forgotten.”

Samael shrugged, “Who cares what a bunch of barbarians think of us?”

* * *

Many years later Samael returned to his favorite niche with a different girl. “So you take all the girls here,” Mehitabel remarked. “Naamah mentioned this place before she vanished.”

“And the boys,” Samael replied carelessly.

Mehitabel hit his arm lightly, “You’re awful.”

“How am I to find my soulmate if I don’t… Look,” the last was said with a lascivious gaze at the young woman walking beside him. 

“With all your ‘looking’ maybe you don’t deserve a soulmate,” Mehitabel replied tartly.

Samael smiled at her, “Well, you’ve consented to come here with me, I take that to mean I do deserve something quite amazing. Don’t you agree?”

“If I didn’t tease you, you wouldn’t like me half as well,” Mehitabel answered.

Samael considered it for several moments. “Probably not.”

“Do you ever wonder what happened to Naamah?” Mehitabel asked randomly. “We were good friends, she never even told me she was going to go.”

“I was sleeping with her, she didn’t tell me either,” Samael replied shortly. “She was curious about the outer world, she left us all for it and she probably died.” 

Then Samael felt a sudden sting in his shoulder, at the same moment he saw Mehitabel slap at her thigh. He stared at the feathered dart that had struck Mehitabel as his vision tunneled in and went dark. 

Two men, dressed in a style vastly different from the people of the City climbed up from the valley to inspect their unconscious victims. “We aren’t set up for two of them,” the younger said.

“I’ve got a good price lined up for a male but bring them both anyway. Don’t want word getting out about us. We’ll behead the girl then burn her back at the camp. With their kind you gotta make damn sure they’re dead,” his senior partner replied.


	2. Enslavement

_“Naturally, I was aware of the others who’d disappeared. The Second Generation was not so large that it could be missed, even by the foolish, ignorant child that I was then. Still, the privileged and sheltered child that I was never really thought about what may have befallen them. It certainly never crossed my mind that such a thing could happened to me._

_“My first experiences with human society would lend themselves to the belief that humans were incomparably wicked... You do realize that you’re asking for stories of a world that was racing pell-mell to your Biblical Flood? But the humans I met were not all humans. The community I grew-up in was composed of Gehennan-human pairs and their offspring. In the world of my childhood the suggestion that either humans or Gehennans, demons if you must, were the source of evil would have been mercilessly ridiculed. If you’d asked me then, where evil came from, I would have said, with utter conviction, that it came from the outside._

* * *

A hard jolt woke Samael from his drugged sleep. Far above him he saw a narrow window of stars. Shear earthen walls surrounded him on all sides. His arms were bound behind his back. “Let me out!” he demanded loudly as he strained against the ropes.

A man laughed. “After all the trouble I went to get you, pretty? I can’t wait to see what you look like once you’re fully awakened.”

“I’ll climb out of here and tear your throat out,” Samael hissed. He knew he was stronger than a normal human, far stronger. Restraints meant for a human should mean nothing to him. Sweat broke out on his face as he fought to break free. 

A narrow pipe swung over the mouth of the pit and icy water poured down on him. Soon he was shivering too hard to fight against the ropes. The water crept up over his ankles, up past his thighs. The cold burned. Samael’s legs collapsed beneath him, he slumped against the wall of his prison, his dark hair hung over his eyes in wet clumps as the freezing water continued pouring down on him. The pit was narrow, like an old well. The water rose fast, up to his stomach, his chest. The cold robbed him of breath but soon the water itself threatened to drown him. As he kicked and struggled to keep his mouth above the water the effort drove back the cold. 

“I think that’s enough,” the man said as he peered over the edge, holding a torch above him. The water was only a few inches deeper than Samael was tall, he pushed off the bottom and gasped for air.

A younger man joined the first at the edge of the pit. “I get why we’re drowning him: Don’t want to risk any scars and who knows what the rules are when they’re still part human. But we’d be done with it sooner if we filled it to the brim. Then we could just shove him down instead of waiting for him to exhaust himself.”

“Shows what you know,” the first man snorted. “If they die too fast you’ve got to go through this whole thing over again. Take the fight out of ‘em right from the start and everything’s easier.”

Samael let himself sink under the water. He crouched and pushed off the bottom with every ounce of strength and determination in his body, thrusting himself out of the water, trying to leap out of the well. The two men jerked back in surprise. “Fuck, he almost made it.” the younger man observed.

“Yeah,” the first man said warily. “Next time they better make the pit deeper. Lazy bums, worrying about how much work it’s going to be hauling ‘em out afterwards. If he goes under like that again best be ready with the cover. If he gets out we are dead. He’s going to get stronger before it’s over.” 

Terror filled Samael’s mind, his lungs burned for air, the pain of the cold was being replaced with numbness that robbed him of the ability to fight. Then a new pain filled his body. The water around him boiled, he felt his body twist and reform, huge wings tore through the old scars on his back and filled the well. The wings that should have carried him to the safety promised by the stars above doomed him. Too large to even begin to spread within the pit’s confines, the sodden feathers dragged him beneath the surface.

Above the older man watched the ripples fade from the surface of the water. He counted slowly to five thousand. “That’s probably enough,” he decided and handed the younger man a rope. “Get down there and tie this around him.”

Grumbling the whole time, the younger man secured a harness around his hips then he let himself down into the pit. “Shit, that’s cold!” he whined as he felt around beneath the water for Samael’s body. 

“There’s a pile of gold waiting when he’s delivered. Buy yourself a hot drink and and someone to warm you up when the deal’s done,” the first man suggested.

“Damn wings, they’re going to wedge when we try to pull him up… and they tore through the binders on him when he grew ‘em.”

“Here,” The first man lowered another rope tied into a large noose down into the pit. “Get that around them then I’ll cinch it tight. Now that he’s properly awakened we don’t have to worry about scars anymore. He’ll heal damn near anything.”

“Okay, I think that’s done it. I’m coming up.” Once the younger man cleared the rim of the pit they both started hauling Samael out. 

The Nephilim’s skin was ghostly pale, his ears were sharply pointed. “Never seen anything like those before,” the older man said as he laid Samael on the ground and spread out one of his wings. The feathers were a mix of black and the deepest purples, giving the wings an iridescent look even in their current bedraggled condition. The wings spanned thirty feet from tip to tip. “I didn’t think the ‘breeds could grow wings and the angels don’t have no color to ‘em. Rare equals valuable, bet we can negotiate a better price for him.” 

The older man turned Samael on his side and forced the water out of his lungs. Then they waited until he started stirring. “Get him back to the edge of the pit,” the man ordered his flunky. Between the two of them they maneuvered Samael so his feet dangled over the mouth of the pit. The older man wrapped thick lengths of rope around him, binding both wings and arms to his torso once again. Then, leaving the younger man to hold Samael in place, he walked around to the other side of the pit and reached across it to grab the nephilim’s sharply pointed chin. He uncorked a flask and held the it beneath Samael’s nose. One whiff of the pungent mixture and Samael cringed away. The man slapped him across the face. “Swear to obey me or I’ll throw you back in,” he said. 

Samael hissed angrily. 

The younger man tipped him forward, as if to dump him back in the icy water. 

“Not yet,” the first man said. “Let’s give him a little time to think over his situation.” He slapped Samael again, harder, drawing blood as Samael’s new fangs cut into his lips. “We got all the time in the world ‘breed. I can dump you down there, come back tomorrow and ask you again. You’re going to give in eventually, just get it over with while I’m still in a good mood.”

Samael’s shoulders drooped but when he looked up his eyes flashed defiance. “I’ll do what you say,” he snarled. 

His bared-teeth didn’t make him look particularly sincere but the man smiled. “Now, say it properly: ‘I swear to obey you’.” 

“I swear to obey you,” Samael repeated immediately, he looked faintly surprised.

“Better. Now what’s your name ‘breed?”

“Samael.”

“Okay Sammy, I’m Boaz. Repeat after me: I, Samael, swear to obey Boaz in all things.”

“I, Samael, swear to obey Boaz in all things.”

“Say it again.”

“I, Samael, swear to obey Boaz in all things.”

“Again.”

Samael shook, something was wrong. He kept saying it over and over again, not even needing prompting after the sixth or seventh repetition. He didn’t understand what was happening to him. 

“That enough now,” Boaz said. He walked around to the other side of the pit. The younger man hauled Samael around then to face Boaz. “I think you’ve got it down. But let’s be sure. Lick my boots clean.”

Spitting in the man’s face seemed like a good idea to Samael, but instead he leaned down. Bound as he was he overbalanced almost immediately and crashed at Boaz’s feet. He squirmed forward until he could press his mouth to the filth covered boots. The thick taste of mud and other things he didn’t want to identify made Samael gag and choke but he didn’t stop. Determinedly he licked at the boots. After a few minutes Boaz crouched and lifted Samael back to his knees, steadying him, petting his hair as he kept at the task he’d been assigned. Samael kept dragging his tongue over Boaz’s boots until the only thing he tasted was leather. “Good boy,” Boaz chuckled. He set Samael back on his heels and cut his bonds. “We don’t need those anymore do we?”

Blood ran out of the corner of of Samael’s mouth, his tongue and lips were raw. He shook his head. Tears ran down his cheeks. 

Boaz reached out and wiped Samael’s tears away with his thumb. “No, you’re my good boy now, aren’t you? Gonna do everything you can to make me happy?”

* * *

Boaz and his flunky, Abner, had set up camp not far from the pit where they’d drowned Samael. As soon as they reached the camp Samael immediately found himself rushing to stroke the fire back to life. He stared at his hands in bewilderment as they stacked fresh logs on the fire and prodded the coals back to life. ‘Why am I doing this?’ he wondered. Another part of his brain supplied ‘Boaz would probably enjoy the warmth. There’s a pail, you could get some water and start warming it, he’d probably like that too. Not the water from the pit-’ 

Samael’s thoughts shattered as memories of drowning exploded into his consciousness again. His hands shook, he gasped for the air he’d been denied then. He’d said what Boaz told him to because swallowing his pride and submitting was a small price to pay for not being thrown back in that pit. It wasn’t as if a few words were going to keep him from ripping their heads off. Samael knew he could easily slaughter two humans, even if they were armed. He was stronger, faster. It wasn’t like it had been back at the mouth of the pit, he wasn’t bound and he’d mostly recovered from being drowned. Boaz and the other one would both be dead before they realized it. 

Boaz walked over and dug his fingers into the feather-covered joint where one of Samael's wings had sprouted as if scratching a dog’s ear. “You’re doing good Sammy. You’re a smart one ain’t ya, figured out what you needed to do to make me happy without even needing to be told. You follow your orders real well.”

Samael’s eyes fell closed for a moment, his wings flexed slightly offering Boaz’s hands better access. A knot of tension he hadn’t even recognized loosened at the reassurance that he was keeping his oath. Boaz chuckled and obligingly continued kneading the feathered joint. 

“We could put that pretty mouth to better use than cleaning your boots,” Abner suggested.

Samael shuddered with revulsion. He stood, spreading his wings wide as the impulse to flee took hold. 

“Fuck, he’s going to escape!” Abner exclaimed.

Boaz shook his head. “Naw, that’d make me unhappy. You don’t want that do you Sammy?”

Samael crumpled, the thought of making Boaz unhappy was like a chain tightening around his chest until he couldn’t even breath.

“Hold for a minute,” Boaz said. “Let me get a proper look at those wings of yours.”

Shivering, his breath coming in panicky gasps, Samael did as he was told. Watching Boaz look at him he’d never felt more frightened or helpless, not even when he’d been drowning in the pit. He knew, knew that he was utterly revolted by what Abner had suggested. After what they’d done to him the only way he’d willingly touch either of them would be to kill them… Or if Boaz told him to. Samael couldn’t understand it, he knew what he should want, how he felt. But Boaz’s orders were like a switch being thrown in his brain. He knew the only reason he wasn’t on his knees already was because it was Abner who made the suggestion and not Boaz.

“Damn, I’ve never seen anything like him,” Boaz marveled at the huge, iridescent black wings. “I’ve heard my great granddaddy talk about seeing angels up close, about their wings, but nobody’s caught more than a distant glimpse of an angel in decades.”

“Tell him to do it,” Abner pressed.

Samael bit his lip and looked away from them.

“Lilith will pay top dollar for him,” Boaz shook his head. “But she doesn’t like second hand goods.”

“He’s at least twenty, it’s not like he’s a virgin,” Abner complained. “And I only want to use his mouth anyway.”

Boaz shook his head. “We just awakened him, he might as well be a newborn. And Lilith always knows. If she had her way we’d bring ‘em to her unawakened, she claims every order given before she gets her claws into them makes them that much harder to train. But if a third of her stable weren’t bound to obey me before all others the bitch would cheat me out of half of what I deserve.“

Boaz noticed the strained, panicky look on Samael’s face. “It’s okay Sammy,” he said. ‘I’m not going to order you to do anything more than I already have. You can go back to what you were doing.”

Samael drew in his wings around him like a shield as he went back to tending the fire. He tried to obliterate Boaz’s final words from his mind: “And once Lilith is done with you, you won’t be afraid… you’ll beg for it.”

* * *

Many days later the three of them road into a sizable town at dusk. Boaz guided them to a sprawling house at the edge of the town then he led Samael around back to a wash house. “Make yourself presentable,” he ordered. “Then come in and find me. I’ll be in the first room to the left of the front door. Make sure you haven’t got a spot of dirt on you, you understand?”

Samael nodded. His mind bubbled over with revulsion and anxiety, he knew he was about to be sold as a whore, but there were more pressing matters at hand: Boaz had ordered him to make himself presentable. 

Samael shed his dirty cloth as entered the bath house. Standing over the cold water basin, he froze for a moment. Close confining walls raising up over his head. Icy water pour over him, until finally he drowned. But Boaz had told him to clean himself so he immersed himself in the cold water bath, scrubbing his body quickly and vigorously. Shivering he hurried on to the tepidarium. Samael spent several minutes in the gently warmed air trying to sort out how to care for his wings. Finally he simply combed his finger through them until the barbs lay neatly aligned. A jar of scented oil waited for him at the exit to the Tepidarium but no cloths. Samael quickly rubbed the oil into his skin. For a brief moment he considered retrieving the clothing he’d arrived in but Boaz had said he should be spotless and his old clothes were covered in filth from the pit. 

Samael walked across the courtyard and into the front door of the house stark naked. The entry hall opened up into a large room. Through the doorway he could see a woman with lavender skin and red hair bent over a table. She was being fucked brutally, huge bruises were spreading from the point where the edge of the table dug into her body. Her expression was one of transcendental ecstasy. Samael turned away quickly. 

In the room Boaz had directed him to Samael found the man taking tea with a grey haired woman. She stared unabashedly at Samael when he walked through the door. After a moment she stood up and walked over to him. “Down. Let her see you.” Boaz ordered and Samael dropped to his knees awkwardly twisting his wings to keep them from crashing into the floor as he knelt. He expected the woman to reach for his wings, but she took his chin between her fingers and turned his face to her. For a long time she stared into his eyes. 

Samael squirmed, he wanted nothing more than to turn away from her eyes but he couldn’t bring himself to disobey Boaz. Lilith smiled. “He doesn’t truly understand yet, perfect.” she said. She stroked Samael’s cheek. “You haven’t even begun to comprehend what’s happened to you, have you?” she asked him then turned to Boaz. “You’re getting better I see. I’ll give you full price for this one, plus a small bonus for the wings. Now give him the order to obey me as if I were you. Eisheth will meet you at the door with your fee.”

Boaz nodded. “Sammy, you heard the lady. Do what she tells you.” he said and then he walked out.

“Now then,” Lilith said once he’d gone. “Let’s get started.”

She walked across the room to a tall-backed chair and regally sat down. “Tell me how I own you.”

“I, Samael, swear to obey Lilith in all things,” he repeated the oath he’d given Boaz, hoping that was what she wanted.

“No,” Lilith scolded and Samael felt the same tightening in his chest he’d felt when Boaz told him he’d made him unhappy. He could see that he was making Lilith unhappy and he was to obey her as if she were Boaz. “No, Samael, that isn’t good enough. You’re failing.” 

A soft, pained moan escaped Samael’s lips, every word she said made the chains wrapped around his chest tighter. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t breath, the crushing weight made every heartbeat painful. He stared at her silently begging her to tell him what he’d done wrong, how to make the horrible feeling go away.

“Boaz didn’t simply sell me your body and your obedience,” Lilith told him. “I own your heart and mind as well. Tell me you give them to me.”

“I Samael, give Lilith my body, my obedience, my heart and my mind,” he said and sagged in relief when she smiled.

Lilith patted her lap. “Come here.” 

Samael started to stand. 

“No.” 

He crawled across the room to her. Lilith tangled her hands in his hair, guiding him to kneel between her legs and press his face into her stomach as she petted him. “Now that you are mine, you don’t have to worry. Relax. As long as you’re good you’ll be happy.”

At her words Samael felt himself melt against her. Her hands carding through his hair, massaging his scalp felt hypnotic.

“You’ll have clients,” Lilith continued. “Your greatest need is to give them pleasure. When you are bringing them pleasure, know that I am happy with you, that you are good. Their pleasure is your own, it will fill you, consume you, it will be an addiction to you. You will beg them to use you for their pleasure because when you go without it will be an ache in your bones, your skin will burn to be touched, longing for their pleasure will fill your dreams and your waking thoughts. You will do whatever you can to please them. However any promise you make them will be meaningless, because even the breath you speak with belongs to me.” 

Lilith tipped Samael’s face up to her and kissed him, deep, open mouth, taking the air from his lungs. The surge of arousal at the press of her lips nearly caused him to blackout. Lilith sat back, she ran cupped his face in her hands, ran her thumbs along the slant of his cheekbones, traced the outer rim of his eye sockets then threaded her fingers into his hair, massaging his temples. “You’re thoughts are mine.” 

Samael’s breath stuttered. 

“Your parents made you this way,” Lilith continued gently. “Your angelic parent managed to subvert God’s will and transfer their devotion to a human paramour; undoubtedly someone who was trusted absolutely. Out of that forbidden union you were born. But you were not born under God’s auspices and when your human blood perished your will was free for anyone to take. You should not exist, your birth was a sin, the irrefutable proof of your parents’ depravity. You do not belong in this world, but I will give you a place.” 

Samael couldn’t argue with anything she was saying. He couldn’t expect his father to care about the effect Satan’s actions had on him. Samael thought it would probably be months, even years, before his father heard he was missing. Chances were his father was still out, somewhere, searching for his mother’s reincarnation, Satan had never been shy about letting his sons know where they ranked in comparison with his dead lover.

A shocking wave of arousal washed over Samael, he gasped and stared at Lilith, realizing that she was enjoying his despair and by some strange alchemy, her satisfaction transformed his anguish into physical pleasure.

“You feel it don’t you,” Lilith murmured, her hand drifting down to rest on his bare chest. “Your heart is mine.”

“It’s not my heart you’re stirring,” Samael replied, his attempt at sarcasm spoiled by a deep, needy groan.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you to relax. It seems you have a smart mouth when you’re not terrified,” Lilith sighed and Samael shivered at her displeasure. “But yes, I own that as well. I own your body.” She stroked her hands over his shoulder, to the point where his wings emerged, then traced her hands back up to the sharp points of his ears. She allowed him to suck on the tips of her fingers as she pressed them against his fangs “Humans are quite odd, these all mark you for what you are: a being who is cursed in God’s sight. But those same traits are what make you so very fascinating.”

“I told you I would give you a place in this world where you do not belong. When you allow the clients I give you to indulge their fascination, to use your body for their gratification, you have worth, it is all that gives your life meaning. And you will love me for giving meaning to your life.”

Hesitantly Samael’s arms came up to embrace her. Tears spilled down his cheeks and were soaked up by her dress but he couldn’t say why he was crying. He was with the one he loved and she would give him what he needed to be worthwhile.

Lilith smiled and continued stroking his hair until he’d cried himself out.


	3. The Outside

_“I’m sure you’ve heard ‘Money is the root of all evil’, perhaps there is truth to that. My personal tormentors took every shred of freedom from me out of the desire for it. However, Boaz and Lilith were far from the only humans to discover the Oaths and there were others who were much more ambitious in how they used us. But then you might argue that money is an ambition, that regardless of how petty or grand an ambition might be it is ambition that convinces a person to trample over all that stand in their way. From that perspective one could generalize and claim that is it ambition that is the root of evil…”_

_“But I was telling you a story. My story but it would be impossible for my twin’s not to intersect it, you instinctively know that… Although perhaps you didn’t know that Lucifer-ni is my twin as well as my brother. His side of the story may give you a broader perspective on the world then. A world in which your Bible tells you evil was new, and like all new things, novel and thus to be indulged in gratuitously. Lucifer-ni saw more of that world than I was allowed, which never stopped him from nagging me endlessly about all that he suffered._

_“I have a complete inability to feel guilt for the actions of others, even if they’re taken on my behalf. Lucifer-ni always claimed it was a massive character flaw, at least as it applied to our relationship. I say if he had been the one taken I might have been the one to go after him and I owe him nothing for what his choices brought upon him. It’s all moot of course, what might of happened cannot change what did happen. It was just something we tended to quarrel over on and off over the eons._

* * *

Lucifer walked out of the council hall leaving behind an inane debate about whether or not Samael would choose to run off to the outside world. It was complete nonsense, Lucifer knew perfectly well that his self-indulgent twin would never chose to venture out among the barbarians.

So Lucifer left Paimon and the rest of the council to their pointless wasting of time and slipped out of the City. Both the City and the surrounding vale had been thoroughly searched so he headed directly for the pass without wasting any more time. The pass eventually broadened into a mountain trail. Lucifer followed it, after a few hours he found an abandoned campsite. Off to one side was a deep pit, partially filled with water that he could make no sense of and a burnt out fire pit. Some of the charred sticks poking out of the ashes looked strange to Lucifer so he took a closer look, using a stick to poke around in the ash. When his prodding uncovered a skull the he scrambled backward, tripped and barely managed to roll onto his knees before vomiting. 

Determinedly Lucifer returned to the pit, he searched until he’d recovered a scapula. He sighed in relief when he couldn’t find any sign of the severed wing-joint that he knew would have been present had the remains been his brother’s. He felt a moment’s guilt for his relief, the burnt body wasn’t his brother’s but it had still been someone, probably one of theirs. It didn’t matter next to the knowledge that it wasn’t Samael.

Lucifer left the body behind and continued down the trail. He perversed for two days in spite of being ill-prepared for an extended trek. Sheer stubbornness kept him going. Snow-melt trickled along the trail regularly enough and he recognized enough editable vegetation to be only hungry rather than starving. 

In time the mountains gave way to rolling hills. The hills offered a greater variety of forage but also more options than Lucifer knew what to do with. In the mountain pass there had really only one way anyone could have gone, now there were a half-dozen paths and there was no way for him to tell which way his brother had been taken. Lucifer picked a direction at random and pressed on.

Five days after leaving the City Lucifer discovered that the Outside had cities of its own. The outside city was a sprawling mass of low buildings, their walls formed of sun-baked mud and straw brick. Lucifer sneered at the crude construction and dirt streets but it was a busy, peaceful trade center. Lucifer’s clothing, which marked him as a stranger to the city, drew attention but no overt hostility. After debating it with himself for several minutes he approached one of the vendors. “My brother was taken from, from our camp. Would you have any idea of where he might have been taken?” he asked.

The man looked Lucifer over more closely, a guarded wariness coming into his eyes. “Forget him, get yourself back to where-ever you come from as quick as you can,” he warned gruffly. “Seal the door after you.”

Lucifer’s eyes blazed. “What have you done with him?” he demanded.

The man stepped back increasing the distance between them. “I’ve no part of that, brings nothing but grief,” he asserted. “But there’s plenty of markets for your kind. Go looking for them and they’ll find you.” 

Lucifer lunged over the flimsy counter separating them. “What do you mean?” he demanded grabbing the man with a speed and strength no human could match. Immediately the mood of the market place shifted, Lucifer found himself the subject of a number of hostile glares. Several men grabbed clubs and moved to surround him. He took a deep breath and released the vendor then stepped back hands at his side. “I apologize,” he said stiffly. “It’s my younger brother, I’m worried for him.”

“Your kind, they’re stronger than us,” the man said. “Some think you’re prettier than us too. There are those who find uses for you once you’ve been broken. Causes problems for all of us that don’t want to be involved. Go away, we don’t want your kind here.”

Lucifer glanced at the others begin to surround him and nodded. He turned and walked away. ‘I can’t do this by myself,’ he admitted privately. ‘I’ll go back and tell Paimon. He’ll know what to do.’

He was barely out of sight of the outside city walls before he was attacked. The only warning he received was an arrow through the thigh. Lucifer screamed as his leg collapsed beneath him. For several minutes he could only stare at the bolt protruding from his leg and his blood slowly welling up around it. Then there were two men with long spears prodding at him. The archer remained further back, a new arrow notched in his bow.

“You pitiful creatures dare?” Lucifer shouted. “I am Lucifer! Son of Satan!” He grabbed the spear out of the first man’s hands and was promptly shot in the shoulder. The second spearman lunged forward driving his weapon deep into Lucifer’s body and using it to pin him to the ground.

“Got any idea what he’s talking about?” The first spearman asked as he retrieved his weapon then impaled Lucifer at an angle to the second spearman so any attempt Lucifer made to wriggle free would only drive him further onto the opposing spear.

“Heard an old story about one of the them named Satan,” the archer said. “Says he tricked some girl, brought God’s wrath down on all of us. That there was no death before he got involved.”

The first spearman risked stepping closer to kick Lucifer in the side. “Guess this is karma then,” he remarked as Lucifer screamed and blacked out.

A fourth man rode up a moment later. He scowled, “I told you, he needs to be conscious when I rescue him. I won’t pay for if you lot fuck this up.”

“Easy enough to fix,” the second spearman said. He wrenched his weapon free of Lucifer’s body. “Grab some rope,” he told the archer. Then he turned to the fourth man, “You get out of sight. I’ve seen these sort in action, it won’t be long before he revives.”

While the fourth man retreated the other three bound Lucifer’s wrists together then tossed the end of the rope over a tree branch and hoisted him up to dangle several inches off the ground. After a moment’s consideration they tied his knees together too and put a noose around his neck which was also looped over the tree branch. “Pull it taut when he struggles,” the second spearman instructed as he handed the archer the other end of the rope. Then the second spearman walked over to a willow tree and cut off several of the narrow, flexible branches. 

In the twenty minutes it had taken to string him up Lucifer’s flesh healed around the arrows and even the two gaping spear-wounds had frail scabs forming over them. His eyelids flickered as he began to regain consciousness. The second spearman grinned sadistically, he snapped one of the willow fronds across Lucifer’s stomach raising a welt. Lucifer woke with a shriek and the spearman laid into him.

By the fifth blow Lucifer was fully alert and struggling in earnest, trying to find the leverage to tear himself free. The archer pulled on until it was the noose around Lucifer’s neck taking his weight rather than his bound arms. Something moved under the muscles of Lucifer’s back as he began to strangle.

After a count of twenty the second spearman signaled for Lucifer to be lowered. He allowed Lucifer one good breath then resumed the whipping. By the sixth iteration Lucifer knew he was more afraid of being hung than whipped and he tried to remain compliant as the spearman raised a network of welts across his stomach, chest and thighs. When he had the breath to do so Lucifer screamed, threatened and begged. The men torturing him only laughed.

Then the fourth man charged back in. He rode down the first spearman, kicking him to the ground before leaping off his horse to confront the second spearman with a short sword. The archer pulled the noose taut and this time he didn’t release it. Lucifer twisted and squirmed as the two men fought. His lips turned blue and the skin on his back writhed. “Holy shit!” The archer exclaimed as massive golden wings ripped through the skin of Lucifer’s back. 

The other men stopped fighting to stare as Lucifer thrashed erratically. His wings beat at the ground and tree. He lacked the coordination to take flight but the branch he hung from snapped under the strain. The second spearman whirled around forgetting his fight with the fourth man to pin Lucifer to the ground with his spear. Then the three of them watched as Lucifer writhed like a bug on a pin. After several minutes his struggles grew weaker and eventually ceased. 

“Well, we’ll just take our fee and be off,” the second spearman said. “Be awkward for you if we were still about when he comes to.”

The fourth man stepped forward, his hand dropped toward the pouch at his waist as if to pay the other men. At the last moment he drew a dagger instead. A snap of his wrist and the dagger was lodged in the archer’s throat. The other two fell almost as quickly. The forth man shook the blood off his sword, “I’ve always found that corpses add a touch of verisimilitude that you just can’t otherwise achieve. And they don’t come back baring tales later.”

The man pulled the spear from Lucifer’s chest and loosened the noose around his neck then he started a fire. He filled a skin with water and hung it over the flames to heat while he stripped the other three men and started cutting their clothes into strips. By the time he’d finished cleaning and bandaging Lucifer’s wounds the young nephilim was stirring weakly. 

Lucifer gasped, his hand rising to touch the abrasions around his throat. The fourth man caught Lucifer’s hand, “I’d love to know what you did to piss them off so badly. But it seemed we should be friends. My enemies are your enemies, yes?” He gestured to the corpses scattered around them.

“Yes,” Lucifer croaked and knew in his heart it was true as soon as he said it.

“You’re lucky I came along when I did kid. They might have killed you,” the man said lightly as he finished dressing Lucifer’s injuries. “You owe me.”

Lucifer nodded. As he tried to sit up the weight of his new wings pulled him off balance. He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes widened in shock. “What?”

“Hell if I know,” the man replied. “They just grew while this lot were trying to hang you. Bit ostentatious if you ask me.” He reached out and carefully stroked a patch of golden feathers into alignment, “But pretty.” 

Lucifer flushed.

“Let’s get you back to my camp,” the man said. He boosted Lucifer up onto his horse. “I’m Cush.”

“Lucifer.”

Cush chattered unrelentingly as he led his horse away from the slaughter at a slow, gentle pace. Lucifer slumped over the horse’s neck doing his best to keep his new wings from dragging in the dirt. Occasionally he nodded or reflexively agreed to whatever Cush was saying when the other man paused and glanced toward him expectantly.

“You and I, we’re going to be good friends aren’t we?” Cush said.

Lucifer wondered if the man was ever quiet as he nodded. Still Cush had saved him, it was only natural to think of the man as a friend, wasn’t it?

* * *

Two moon cycles later Lucifer stood at Cush’s shoulder, golden wings half spread providing the human with an awesome backdrop as he addressed his army. “We have been driven back, all but forced from the lands of our fathers. But today we will be victorious!” Cush declared as the army began to cheer. “I sought the answers as to why we have suffered so and in response God sent me an angel to fight alongside us to counter the demons our enemies have raised against us. Today we begin a campaign to reclaim what is rightfully ours!”

The cheers swelled to a deafening cacophony. From the other side of the plain Lucifer could hear the opposing army also being whipped into a frenzy.

“I don’t want you to be surprised,” Cush murmured to Lucifer, his voice barely audible beneath the shouts and rattling of shields. “Our enemies have some of your kind enslaved in their service. That’s what they were trying to do to you when I found you. They meant to break your mind so you could be remolded into a weapon for their use. I saved you from that fate.” Cush paused expectantly and automatically Lucifer agreed. “Now you’re going to save them. Even if you kill them you’ve saved them, you understand that don’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” Lucifer agreed with conviction. “To serve your enemies is a fate worse than death.” He leapt into the air. Cush raised an arm to shield himself from the powerful backdraft as Lucifer took to the skies.

Both armies took Lucifer’s flight as a signal to charge. The opposing forces raced at each other and clashed in the center of the plain. Their lines dissolved into chaos as they hacked and stabbed at each other.

From above Lucifer spotted a giant of a man, thirty feet tall. Before him the ranks of Cush’s army fell like leaves. Lucifer drew his sword and flew at the giant. He’d never held a sword before meeting Cush and there was no technique to his attack. Lucifer dove out of the sky and struck at the giant with all the strength and momentum he could muster. The giant raised an arm to knock away Lucifer’s blow but the sword sheared through it and split its skull.

Cush’s men screamed in triumph as the giant fell. They pressed their moment of victory and the demoralized enemy forces crumpled. Caught up in the rush of battle Lucifer landed in the midst of the enemy army and laid about him slaughtering dozens. In that one moment the battle was won although it would be over an hour before the last of their enemies surrendered his sword. Somewhere along the way Lucifer lost his sword, caught up in the blood lust he ripped his opponents apart with his bare hands. In the end Lucifer stood alone on a piles of corpses drenched in blood. Cush smiled at him with approval and Lucifer felt a warm glow in the center of his chest.

* * *

Meanwhile with both Lucifer and Samael missing Paimon was able to overcome the people of the City’s reluctance to venture into the outside world;. He organized a rescue party and set out after the pair. Like Lucifer, they quickly discovered the burned corpse. Paimon organized it’s return to the City while the rest of the party continued searching. 

By the time the body was identified as Mehitabel’s they’d found over a dozen more corpses secreted along the trail leading to their valley, some of them decades old. Paimon ordered a gate to be built across the entrance to the valley and had sentries stationed to guard it.

When they found themselves without a clear trail to follow Paimon split his forces and told them to superstitiously observe the Outside to learn what had happened to Satan’s son and the others who’d gone missing. But even for the two near-Princes there were few people willing to go out into the world beyond the valley for an extended time. Paimon himself had duties to the City that he couldn’t set aside for more than a few days at a time. He dispatched the resources he had and disjointed information slowly trickled in but no clear leads on Samael or Lucifer’s whereabouts. Then one day several Outsiders were discovered sulking around the gate. It had been four years since Samael went missing.

“The other two were killed when they attacked us but we captured this one,” the sentry reported shoving a tall heavy-set man with greying hair to the floor at Paimon’s feet.

“So, you’re one of them, the kidnappers who steal our people away,” Paimon said. At seven feet tall, not counting his horns he towered over the human struggling awkwardly to his feet. His short, fleshly tail lashed back and forth angrily. “We managed to find a pitiful few of them. When we tried to rescue them they refused. You’re going to tell me why.”

“I don’t think so,” Boaz replied with a grim smile. “I might be out, but that’s no reason to ruin the business for everyone else.”

 

With a snarl Paimon grabbed him by the front of his shirt and lifted him off the floor. “Tell me!” he demanded giving Boaz a shake. 

The human spit in his face. For a moment Paimon was tempted to break Boaz’s neck right there, then he stopped. “Do you remember what they did to Mehitabel?” he asked the sentry instead.

“Of course,” the sentry replied, puzzled.

“Get some rope and meet me in the furnace room,” Paimon said. Still holding Boaz off the ground by the front of his shirt Paimon started carrying him toward the basement stairs. “Your kind burned her, so I will burn you. She was dead at the time, you won’t be, after all I still want answers. When you have provided them I will allow you to die.”

The furnace room was an oppressively hot, dim, low ceilinged basement dominated by heavily metal box with a mass of pipes emerging from it like grasping tentacles, a malevolent glow emanating from a maw-like door. The sentry ran in behind them with the rope. 

Paimon ripped Boaz’s shirt off him. Boaz gasped as Paimon forced his back against the heated metal of the furnace and bound there. “We’ll talk after you’ve charbroiled for a few hours,” he said turning to leave.

“Wait!” Baoz cried.

“That was surprisingly easy,” Paimon remarked. “We found the bodies. Why do you take some and kill others?”

“Make it stop! I’ll tell you!”

“Tell me and I’ll stop it, once you make me believe.”

“We kill them all.” Boaz arced against the ropes and the skin on his back tore, the epidermis sticking to the heated metal.

“Keep talking.”

“The ones we want get better.”

Paimon eventually dragged everything Boaz knew of the Oaths out of the man, then he left. When he returned he asked again and the answers didn’t change much although there was less desperation and more resigned hatred in Boaz’s voice the second time. 

The room reeked with of the smell of roasted meat, Boaz’s flesh. “You should be thanking me for what I’ve done,” he slurred. “You were created to serve us, I’ve just put the ones I catch back in their proper place, brought you back to the place God gave you. You lot brought death upon us and now you hide from the hardships you brought on us in your City, laughing at us. But look at you, just look at you, no angel but a monster, a beast with horns and a tail.”

Paimon stared at Boaz for a long time. “Ingrate,” he said finally. “You blame us for bringing death to your kind? But you aren’t one of the first souls, you were one of the forgotten, withering away in the Void. You were never of the elect, death was always your destiny. It was our founders who brought you to this place and it was because of them that you were granted even a taste of life.” He put his hand over Boaz’s mouth and nose, cutting off his air. “Go back to the Void, and the next time you are born, remember that it is all you would have known if not for us. In your next life bow down and thank us for the respite we brought you and pray we don’t end it prematurely for the crimes of your last life.”

Three years later Satan returned to the Valley for a brief visit and learned that both his sons had been captured. He shrugged and returned to his search for his dead love after a few days rest.


	4. Despair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay. I can't believe how many times this chapter was redrafted and I still don't like it much.

_“I say that what did happen is all that matters, but in truth there is some importance on the stories we chose to remember. Even the stories that may not be precisely true. For example a good portion of the world’s population believes that the first act of evil, once the difference between good and evil was known, was motivated by sibling rivalry. If the story of Cain and Abel conveys anything to me, it is that while sibling rivalry may not be considered an origin of evil, it certainly holds a dominant place in the annals of evil._

_“You agree with me don’t you? You know that insidious little voice: Why am I not the favored one? Why is my offering rejected where my brother’s is welcome. Or perhaps: I am more successful, harder working, why am I less loved? … Or should the question be why am I less loveable? Is that what you wondered over the years spent growing up side by side?_

_“You know what that voice can inspire. Gehennans and Humans could be considered brothers as well. Children of the same parent, only separated from ourself by a few quirks of genetics and the order of birth, wondering, always wondering why they weren’t equal._

_“But hardly relevant to this part of Lucifer-ni and I’s story. As I said before Lucifer-ni liked to blame me for what he suffered, he also liked to claim responsibility for a rescue that I maintain never came. It’s hard to quarrel with a sibling who wasn’t there for hundreds of years.”_

* * *

“I’ve indulged you enough,” Lilith declared and Samael quickly scrambled backward, still not rising from the floor. It was easier than it should have been to shut off his tears or perhaps it was ridiculous that he was crying in the first place when Lilith had told him everything was right in his world. 

Lilith watched him and after a moment he tried to rearrange his wings and limbs so that he was kneeling at her feet with a modicum of grace. She nodded and reached over to ring a bell sitting on the table beside her chair. A few moments later the girl Samael had seen on his way in appeared in the doorway and smoothly dropped to her knees, her long red hair falling forward to cover her face. She had dressed in a wrap that covers her breasts and a filmy skirt that hung low on her hips. There were dark purple marks in the shape of hands marring the paler lavender skin at her waist, the purple bruises almost match the tail curling around her leg. This time Samael couldn’t look away or deny that she was his Naamah. He wondered if she’d left the valley to explore the outer world and then been captured or if she’d been taken from the valley as he had been. 

“Show him to the attic room and let him know my expectations,” Lilith ordered 

Naamah nodded, giving no indication whether or not she had recognized Samael. “Follow me,” she said and he followed her out of Lilith’s sitting room to a back stairway. There was no door to the attic, the stair went up through the second floor ceiling and opened up on a broad, slope-ceilinged room. 

Naamah stepped to the side when she reached the last stair and let Samael pass her. “Stay here until summoned,” she said.

Samael couldn’t stand straight without bumping his head even at the highest point in the room but it’s breath gave him the space to spread his wings more than any other room he’d been in so far. Hesitantly he crossed the floor to the straw tick beneath the eaves. As he sank down on it Naamah turned to leave. “Why are you here?” she whispered once her back was to him, “You were supposed to stay a pretty memory.” She left before Samael could find a response. 

Samael shut his eyes. Like poking at a fresh scab, he tested the bindings wrapped around his thoughts. Boaz, Lilith, escape, murder, Naamah, home. ‘If I’d known then what I knows now I wouldn’t have said a word even if they’d drowned me a hundred times,’ the thought made him feel as if chains were being pulled painfully tight around his chest, crushing his heart and lungs with guilt but the pain told him that the thoughts were his own. 

On the very edge of slipping into an exhausted sleep Samael heard the inconsolable sobbing of an abandoned child. “As long as you’re good you’ll be happy,” Lilith had said, ‘Liar,’ Samael thought.

* * *

Samael slept for a day and a half. Everything familiar, everything safe had been stripped away from him. Even his own body had become something strange and threatening. He slept and hoped to wake in his own bed back in the City, the victim of a particularly vivid and gruesome dream. Every time he woke and found himself lying on a crude straw tick, his shoulders weighed down by wings with a span nearly four times his height he closed his eyes and willed himself back to sleep. 

As his second day in Lilith’s house waned Samael’s body forced him to acknowledge his new reality. As much as he wanted to keep on sleeping until he opened his eyes on a world that didn’t fill him with horror, his throat was parched and his bladder refused to be ignored any longer. Samael rolled to his feet and promptly stumbled as the unfamiliar weight of his wings pulled him off balance. He walked across the room to the stairs. There with one foot on the first stair, Samael froze. He’d been told to stay until summoned. 

Warily he backed away from the stairs. He scanned the room for a washroom door or failing that, a chamber pot. ‘The barbarians have managed buildings, surely that has occurred to them as well,’ he thought, but apart from the tick he’d slept on the room was empty of furnishings. 

Sounds drifted up from the floors below, all the naivety in the world wouldn’t have been enough to disguise their meaning and Samael wasn’t naive. His skin itched and he was consumed with induced guilt that he wasn’t below proving to Lilith that he could be good for her. But he’d been told to stay until summoned. ‘How can I be good when Lilith’s orders and those of her proxy contradict each other?’ he thought clawing at his chest and the painful constriction lodged there. 

Beyond that, his body’s needs were still unmet and becoming increasingly painful. ‘I will not soil the house like an animal!’ Slowly Samael smiled to himself. ‘No sane person would be made happy by that. Lilith would not be pleased if I thought her insane.’ His foot crept forward. One step then another. Down the stairs and along the back hallway. His heart hammered in his chest and a cold sweat broke out on his brow as he stumbled past the rooms and the sounds of intercourse. ‘If Lilith is sane this is the course which will please her. No one likes to be thought insane, so I will make her happy and behave as if she is a sane being. It was only her proxy who told me to stay, Lilith’s desires were not fully conveyed, or perhaps details were forgotten. I will go out and deal with this like a civilized being, or at least as close an approximation as can be maintained among barbarians.’

He had just started down the last flight of stairs when he saw Naamah at the other end of the hall. Samael felt his heart and lungs constrict, terror and guilt fought for supremacy. Naamah hurried across the distance between them, bracing her shoulder against his chest before he could crumple completely. “Some tests are best not to pass too cleanly,” she whispered as she pressed a chamber pot into his hands. “Hurry back upstairs and shout a bit once you’re there, someone will bring you food and water. Tomorrow evening you’ll be expected in the main lobby.”

* * *

The next day when the shadows grew long Samael snuck down stairs. The main lobby was a large room taking up three-quarters of the first floor, it was well-lit with lanterns hung in all four corners, there were scattered groupings of couches and a large harp that could have come from the City. ‘So one of Jubal’s apprentices was taken,’ Samael thought as he slipped in and pressed his back against the wall, pulling his wings in as tightly as he could. 

It didn’t take Samael long to figure out the purpose of the room. Naamah and the others in Lilith’s possession were displaying themselves around the room. The thought of behaving so disgusted Samael but it was obviously what Lilith wanted. Without wanting to, Samael re-evaluated the room. There was a bench slightly behind the harp where he could spread his wings and provide a backdrop to the room without obscuring any of the others. 

Men from the outside came in. Some came over and engaged in false, stilted courtship conversations, fooling only themselves before they paid Eisheth and took the one they’d selected to one of the rooms. Others made fewer pretenses, if they cames into the room at all it was only to demand a better look at their prospective purchase. Still others were met at the door as soon as they arrived. Sometimes Lilith would come out of her sitting room and wave someone over, Samael assumed there were other clients who didn’t want to be seen who came and went by Lilith’s sitting room door. 

At first it was enough for Samael to just sit there, displaying himself. Nearly everyone who came in looked at him, his wings, but one of the others always headed them off before they reached him. At first Samael was grateful but as the evening wore on he felt an itch building up under his skin. He needed the chance to show that he could be good, could make Lilith happy. 

The second day was worse and those that followed even more so. Frequently he found himself halfway out of his seat, moving toward anyone who looked his way for more than a moment, only to be left looking awkward and feeling lost when another diverted them. Naamah put a hand on Samael’s arm, directing him back to his bench. “It’s not punishment,” she whispered. “Instruction. Lilith wants you to have a controlled taste of what defiance feels like, so you’ll exert yourself to please her.”

As the days continued to pass by wanting ate him alive, just as Lilith had commanded. He wanted to compare it to adolescence, and first becoming aware of sexuality but the intensity of it made the comparison a mockery. The need to be touched, used, taken, was so overwhelming, he could barely bring himself to eat. The fantasies that filled his dreams and his own touch brought no relief. 

“How do I show her I’m a fast learner?” 

“Samael, learn very quickly that ignorance can be a source of happiness.”

As his misery increased the voice of the unseen child sobbing piteously became an almost constant presence in the back of Samael’s mind. When he was alone in his room he found himself reaching out, stroking the walls of the house, uncertain if he was offering or asking for comfort. 

By the third week, sitting in the main lobby serving as a decorative backdrop was almost more than Samael could manage. He wanted to claw his skin bloody. Several times he’d prostrate himself at Lilith’s feet and begged her for the chance to show his appreciation for her taking ownership of him only to receive nothing more than a cool look in reply as she stepped over him. But sitting in the lobby was still following an order and eased his suffering no matter how inadequate he felt. Every time another was selected he heard Lilith’s voice echoing in his memory, reminding him that he was failing in the only task that gave his life meaning. 

So when Lilith stepped out of her sitting room and waved him over, Samael was flush was gratitude that she was finally giving him a chance to prove himself. He tripped over his own feet as he lept up and he barely missed knocking over the harp with a wing as he hurried across the room. Lilith laughed and reached up to stroked his hair, stopping him at the doorway until he managed to arrange himself. 

“Come.” She led him into her sitting room. Without prompting, Samael dropped to his knees before the man who waited there, bowing his head until his forehead touched the floor boards. 

“Not exactly my preference,” the man remarked to Lilith. 

Samael felt a sob welling up in his throat at the realization he was being rejected again. He reached out one hand to touch the man’s foot pleadingly. 

“If I catered solely to your tastes I’d go broke,” Lilith replied. “Still he’s my latest acquisition, brand new exactly as you like. I’ve been saving him for you, just in case.”

“How long?” The man asked.

Lilith smiled, “Twenty-five days.”

The man looked at Samael with renewed interest. “Are the wings as sensitive as their tails?” he asked as he crouched in front Samael.

“Do you see any others with wings? If I knew you wouldn’t have the pleasure of discovering it.” Lilith replied tartly. 

“The pleasure of watching him discover it,” the man said. He ran his hand down the length of Samael’s spine then grasped the base of his tail and twisted it.

Samael yelped and lurched away from the pain, almost into the man’s lap. That such a little thing could hurt so much was all but beyond comprehension. The man pulled him closer, tilting his face up, “Look at me,” he ordered and waited until Samael was staring into his eyes then twisted his tail again. 

Samael shrieked but when he saw the pleasure in the man’s eyes, the rush of pain was transmuted to bliss. “What? This doesn’t-” He gasped in confusion, pressing himself against his tormentor.

“No, you understand perfectly, I love seeing pain in your eyes,” the man laughed. He dug his nails into the sensitive base of his tail, smiling as Samael writhed against him. 

“I’ll take him,” the man told Lilith.

“Eisheth will collect the standard fee when you’re done,” Lilith replied as she withdrew. “Try not to get blood on my couch this time.”

The man pulled Samael flush against him, let him feel his cock hardening between them. Then he held up a hinged metal ring with inward-pointing spikes. “Remember, your screams please me,” he whispered in Samael’s ear as he reached behind him to clamp the ring around the base of Samael’s tail.

Samael’s vision whited-out. For an eternity the only thing he was aware of was the narrow spikes burrowing into his sensitive flesh until they struck bone. Then the man wiggled the horrible thing back and forth until the spikes found gaps between one vertebrae and the next. 

The ring was too small to fit cleanly around Samael’s tail but the man squeezed until it locked closed. He smiled at the way Samael wailed and thrashed against him. The damage to his tail sapped most of the Nephilim’s strength, allowing the human to contain his struggles. “Keep screaming, you’re doing so fucking good.”

The man held Samael tight against him for what seemed forever. Occasionally he would reach down to tug on the ring when Samael’s struggles weakened. Finally Samael felt a tearing pain in his throat that stood out from the pain in his tail and the next thing he knew his mouth was full of blood. It was only then that Samael realized he’d been screaming the whole time. 

“Your screams please me.” The memory of the man’s words brought a rush of warmth. The pain was no less but the pleasure provided a counterpoint and cleared his head a bit. Samael came to himself enough to know that at some point the man had laid him on the floor of Lilith’s sitting room and crawled on top of him as he writhed in agony. 

Samael’s wings weren’t jointed to lie flat. Lying on his back was uncomfortable with the straw tick beneath him. On bare stone with the weight of another man on top of him Samael felt as if the joints might pop out at any moment. And still it was nothing compared to the pain of his abused tail trapped between his body and the stone floor so he drew his wing in underneath him until they provided a cushion and took his weight off his tail bone. 

“That’s a good boy. You scream so pretty,” the man cooed in his ear. It should have felt degrading, but the praise sparked effervescent thrills of pleasure that raced up and down Samael’s nerves and the more he focused on the man’s cooing the less the agony radiating out from his tail mattered. He wanted more of that, more praise, more pain-relief. Samael’s limbs felt weak as water but he tried to reach for the man, to run his hands down his body, to trade pleasure for pleasure. He was rewarded with a thumb dug viciously into his wing-joint. It hurt less than lying on his wings in the first place, Samael ignored it to work a hand between their bodies. “Ch-” the man hissed. He frowned at Samael’s wings in distaste. “What a waste of flesh, hardly any nerves,” and the withdrawal of approval hurt in all the ways that abusing Samael’s wings hadn’t. It destroyed the delicate balance he had achieved, casting him back into the white-hot agony of metal scraping against bone and brushing raw nerves. 

When Samael came back to himself again the human was rutting against him. He took it as praise because he needs something more to cling to that the memory of the man saying he enjoys hearing him scream. He tried to be more subtle about pressing back into the body on top of him. Tried to keep the man focused on sex instead of torture without drawing attention to what he was doing. For a moment it seemed to work. He’d almost reached the tipping point of swamping himself in pleasure when the man grabbed his hand and twisted one finger back until it broke and catapulted Samael back into agony. 

Samael quickly learned to ride the knife edge between agony and bliss. He dug his claws into the floor as he arched beneath the man until they tore off. Better to inflict the pain himself than to wait for the man to provide it. When he was completely wrung out, shivering and mindless, his nerves so raw that there was no more distinction between pleasure and pain the man took him. And when he was done he took the torture device off Samael’s tail and walked out, leaving the Nephilim lying on a floor liberally smeared with his own blood. 

For a long time after the man left Samael stared blankly at the ceiling. Eventually Lilith came in. She pulled over a chair and sat beside him, fastidiously arranging her skirts so they wouldn’t get stained by his blood. “You did well Samael. I’m quite pleased with you.”

Her words made the echoes of agony still reverberating through his body lose significance. It was tempting to bask in her approval. To whimper and beg for praise, to let her make him feel good. Samael turned his head away instead.

“I’ll tell the others to stop diverting attention from you,” Lilith continued.

Samael pressed his lips together, determined not to cry again when he recognized his initial reaction as gratitude. 

“Not all of them will want your pain, your oaths making you love anything they might want to do to you. I told you before: you’re exotic, for some that is enough,” she paused for a moment. “There are some women who’ve approached me, the reason I was looking for a male. But you’ll need to learn to control your fertility before I offer you to them.”

Samael wondered if Lilith meant her words as comfort despite her cool and aloof tone.

“Boaz told me you were intelligent,” she said. “For me that means slower to break in but more valuable in the long run. For you… Understand that you will break. In truth you already have, just not to point of losing hope that you can heal. Fight it as long as you need but I’ve watched every one of the others go through the same process. You will break, you will shatter and once you’ve given up hope you’ll be able to feel happy again.”

“Who is it that cries all the time?” Samael asked, his voice hoarse from screaming. “If we’re so happy, who never stops crying?”

A puzzled expression crossed Lilith’s face, “No one cries,” she said.


	5. Conquest

_“I began by telling you that, to me, the notion of either humans or gehennans, demons if you must, as the origin of evil was preposterous. I do realize that my story so thus far hasn’t offered much evidence of that. The City, the society built by demons and humans was peaceful. The Outside, the various cultures my brother and I encountered which were built by Man alone were dominated by violence._

_“Of course we of the City had the advantage of my parents’ scouting. The City had access to a wealth of resources, it was all but impossible to find and easy to defend. We had the powers stolen from the Eldest and the knowledge painstakingly recovered from memories of before the Void. Survival was not a challenge for us._

_“But in spite of our isolation, the Outside world knew more of us than we knew of ourselves. Do you not wonder how that came to be?”_

* * *

Cush’s enemies fell one by one, Erech and Accad, Calneh and Rehboth, Resen and Niniveh, until only Aneb-Hetch was left. Where Cush had his Guardian Angel Lucifer, the Hetch had their God-King Ptah. Where the other city-states had two or three Nephilim at most, Lucifer had killed over a dozen sent against them by Ptah and still more came.

“The Hetch sent three demons against us this time,” Cush told Lucifer while his soldiers were finishing off their prisoners from the latest battle. “They’re recruiting, conspiring against me with the lands beyond their borders.”

“Yes of course,” Lucifer agreed because Cush liked to hear his thoughts confirmed and it was a little thing to do when he owed Cush so much.

Cush put his hand proprietarily on the back of Lucifer’s neck. “Ptah’s realized that my guardian angel is superior to any of his demons. I’ll have to get your allies before he manages to overwhelm you with numbers.”

“Thank you,” Lucifer replied, warmed that Cush worried about him.

That night Cush brought a girl clad in white to Lucifer’s room. “It’s a long term plan,” he said with a shrug. “I’m looking into other options but putting it off won’t increase our ranks any sooner.”

Lucifer stared at the girl in honest bewilderment. “I don’t understand.”

“Impregnant her,” Cush explained. “You’re the most powerful of your kind I’ve heard tell of and there are rumors about her mother. She and her sisters might have some demon blood running in their veins. The two of you should have strong children.”

The girl stood behind Cush staring at the floor, her hands were clenched behind her back but she couldn’t completely hide that they were shaking.

“Obviously it will be years before the child can fight but the sooner started…” Cush left Lucifer with the nameless girl. 

Lucifer stared at her, in her simple white robe she looked like a sacrifice. Suddenly he found himself wishing he were more like his long lost younger brother. Lucifer had never known why Samael had, one day, taken it into his head to make a goal of sleeping with every other member of their generation. He had even less of a clue as to how Samael had managed to be as successful as he had. But at that moment he sincerely wished that he could channel Samael’s ability to make people love him… Or at least willing to sleep with him. Or that Cush had done a better job of explaining to the girl why this was necessary. He tried to recall how Samael had gone about approaching a new interest. ‘Well there was one obvious thing to say.’

“What’s your name?” Lucifer asked.

* * *

Samael and Naamah stood on opposite sides of his room, practically plastered against the walls. “How can this be so awkward?” he asked, aggravation overcoming the distance he’d maintain from her since being sold into Lilith’s possession. “It’s not as if we haven’t had sex before. We lost our virginity together.”

Naamah laughed bitterly, “Maybe that’s exactly our problem. Even though Lilith told me to teach you our bodies aren’t for our enjoyment anymore. This,” her gesture seemed to include not just the room and the two of them but the whole house and maybe the whole outside world, “it’s all wrong and I can’t even say for sure if it’s because I feel guilty over the possibility of enjoying something that doesn’t directly benefit Lilith or if it’s because you were supposed to stay a good memory, one that I don’t want tainted with this.”

Samael glanced at Naamah warily. “Should we tell her?” He tested, “That we had something once and it doesn’t feel right to be together now that we belong to her?” 

Naamah shook her head. “First Rule: What she doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her. It makes Lilith happy to think that we’re nothing more than what she tells us to be. Don’t tell her differently, she doesn’t want to be wrong.” 

“Ah,” Samael nodded to himself, “I understand. Shall we start? Perhaps theoretically what you’ve learned of our condition. We can work up to practical application.”

“Alright,” Naamah agreed. “The matter that makes us up is more malleable than humans. I’ve heard tell that God differentiated matter and gave it form and name to create everything of Assiah. Everything except Angels, they were made to be God’s hands and feet, his eyes and his voice, not fully differentiated from the one who is everything and nothing. Those that followed Satan differentiated themselves and did not do as thorough a job of it as God. Because we are not fully differentiated we are not fixed.”

Naamah paused for a moment. “When you’re with the clients, don’t look at yourself through their eyes,” she said. “Lilith’s oaths make us desperate to please and we are malleable by nature. If you look through their eyes too much you’ll become nothing more than a mirror reflecting their desires back at them,” she warned as an aside.

“But specifically what Lilith wants to learn is to adjust your fertility,” Naamah said. “Observe me.”

* * *

“We’ve all learned this. You’re not trying!” Naamah complained weeks later..

Samael glared at her, “I am trying!” he hissed. “I can sense the cycle you’re shifting in you, but it is not in me. I have speeded my body’s rhythm a hundred times beyond what you showed me but my fertility does not change. I am trying! It simply doesn’t work!” 

As he spoke the very air around him seemed to darken and warp. Naamah stepped back nervously, her gaze lit on the floor beneath his feet and widened fearfully. “Samael! Stop!” she cried. “Look.”

Samael let go the power he’d summoned and glanced down. The floor at his feet was rotting. “Oh, that is interesting,” he said. His teeth flashed in an unpleasant smile as he gathered his power again and started strolling toward Naamah. “I cannot do what you do, but perhaps…” He reached out and touched her, nudging her body’s time along instead of his own. “Yes, that. There is no cycle in me to change, but I can manipulate the cycle in you. As long as human females are the same, it will all work out.”

Naamah shuddered at the feel of him taking control of her personal time, causing it to jump forward just as she’d demonstrated. Only she meant for him to change himself, not her. She took a deep breath. “As long as you don’t get caught,” she advised. “Lilith wouldn’t like knowing that you’re manipulating your clients.”

“But as long as I achieve the end she desires she need not worry herself with the mechanics?” Samael replied lightly. “We wouldn’t want her giving herself frown lines, true?”

Naamah ducked her head and smiled. “Very true.”

Later, when he was alone Samael picked a seed off the floor and balanced it on his finger. He narrowed his eyes and over the course of the night it sprouted, flowered and died. “I wonder what else I can do,” he said to himself.

* * *

Lucifer stood at the mouth of his old valley home and stared at the heavy gate barring the entrance. ‘How long have I been gone?’ he asked himself.

“Is this going to be a problem?” Cush’s general asked him.

Lucifer considered it. He’d found himself up against five other Nephilim in his last battle, he’d barely managed to scrape a victory for Cush. He had four children by Lo-Ruhamah and her two sisters, three of whom he was certain would be powerful, but the oldest was only ten. They were growing much more quickly than he and Samael had, even so it would still be decades before any of them were grown enough to fight. “Wait here,” he said and took to the air.

Lucifer flew over the gate and pounced on one of the sentries, dragging the man kicking and screaming into the sky. He flew higher and higher, out of retaliatory range in seconds, his arm locked around his captive’s throat until the man fell unconscious. Lucifer landed among Cush’s soldiers. “Once he’s spoken to Lord Cush he’ll understand the need for this,” he said as they secured the man he’d kidnapped.

Several days after their return Lucifer heard a raised voice coming from Cush’s quarters. “I will agree to nothing! Do what you will, I would rather die than be bound to a human’s service!”

Without hesitating for thought Lucifer burst into the room. “Lord Cush is all that stands between this world and ruin,” he declared.

“Lucifer?” The captive sentry exclaimed.

“Do you truly believe you’ll be safe cowering in our valley?” Lucifer demanded. “The wicked will multiply until you’re overrun. Cush is the taking the fight to their door while you hide!”

The humans took you-”

“Cush saved me! He showed me the truth of the world. You should be on your knees thanking him for the opportunity to do something before the world’s evil seeks you out in that hole where you’ve buried your head!”

“Do you truly believe?”

“With all my heart and soul,” Lucifer stated fervently. “Join me, help us save this world. I will fight Cush’s enemies to my last breath, but if I had an ally it might not come to that.”

The sentry stared into Lucifer’s eyes for a long time. Then he said, “You I’ll follow.”

* * *

When their next battle arrived the former sentry, Kokabiel, stood in Lucifer’s shadow with a look of indifference as Cush rallied his armies. As always, when the aging warlord finished he turned to Lucifer to give the Nephilim his own words of encouragement. 

The relationship between them was nothing like what Kokabiel had been given to expect. The information Paimon had gleaned from Boaz had been disseminated throughout the City. From that, Kokabiel expected humans of the Outside to treat his kind like chattel but Cush was almost paternal, guiding and advising Lucifer. And Lucifer was fiercely loyal in return. He hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t expected to find one of Satan’s long lost sons when he’d been captured and dragged into the Outside. 

Upon being captured Kokabiel’s expectations for himself had been a slow, horrific death only to be reborn with a slave’s collar around his neck awaiting a master to chain him. But if Kokabiel had died it had happened in his sleep and his body hadn’t changed for it, not that he could ever have been mistaken for human. He had been born covered in silvery scales with a long reptilian tail that he kept coiled around his waist. He was half human, but not because one of his parents had been human. Kokabiel’s parents and grandparents before them had all been half-human, although human blood hadn’t run strong in any of them. 

From what Boaz had revealed, Kobabiel knew that his will couldn’t be taken until his human blood died, first death as it had become known. He couldn’t believe that he could have died and not know it, still he remained wary and aloof from the humans. He would have refused to interact with them at all on the off chance that they might still have the means to bind him, except Kokabiel hadn’t expected to find Lucifer and when he did he had jumped at the chance to stay near the lost prince. ‘It isn’t as if swearing myself to another Nephilim is the same as giving an Oath to a human,’ he told himself. 

Kokabiel stood back and watched while Cush took a moment to speak with Lucifer before the battle was joined. “Ready?” Lucifer called once Cush was done. He grabbed Kokabiel and took to the air as Cush’s army collided with Ptah’s.

* * *

Years passed. Cush grew more grey and his son Seba took on more and more of his father’s duties. Battles came and went. Little ground was gained against the Hetch, but little was lost either. Lucifer and Kokabiel grew practiced at fighting together. 

“There!” Kokabiel exclaimed pointing to a spot where Cush’s line was collapsing too rapidly.

Lucifer swooped down and spotted a quartet of fierce women warriors with the heads of lions. He dropped Kokabiel in their midst then grabbed one of the women by the scruff of her mane. While she screamed in rage and tried awkwardly to bring her spear to bare Lucifer flew higher and higher at a dizzying rate. When the battle field looked like nothing more than a kicked ant-hill Lucifer dropped the woman.

Kokabiel crouched between the three remaining lion-women, a long dagger in each hand, his tail lashing behind him. As he danced around their lunges he saw their fourth comrade’s body strike the ground scattering Ptah’s forces like a cannonball. Lucifer dove back into the fray only a heartbeat behind the body. He used the speed of his descent to take his next target off guard, running her through before she realized her peril. But before he could gain altitude again the third of the lion-women launched herself at his back. Kokabiel’s tail lashed out, the last half meter, thin and flexible, coiled around her throat. He used her own momentum to snap her neck, feeling only a small ache from the tug on his tail. As she fell Kokabiel threw one of his daggers, it sank to the hilt in the last woman’s eye.

“I loath killing so many of our kind,” Kokabiel said to Lucifer as they aided in the clean-up after the battle, searching the fallen for any enemy survivors then executing them.

“Ptah has stolen their will and made them his slaves. It’s a kindness to kill them,” Lucier replied serenely.

“It might be possible to save them,” Kokabiel said.

“You told me that Paimon tried and failed back in the City.”

Kokabiel nodded, “We rescued two girls from a caravan. One escaped us and fled back to the humans. The other… She eventually starved herself to death. But this Ptah, he calls himself the God-King, can you imagine him binding those in his thrall to anyone save himself? If we killed him there would be no one holding their chains.”

“We could recruit them to Cush’s cause,” Lucifer decided.

“With Ptah gone the threat will end, won’t it?” Kokabiel asked. “We’ll be free to return home.”

“Cush’s enemies are legion,” Lucifer said. “When Ptah falls others will take his place.” 

Kokabiel bowed his head, accepting the certainty in his prince’s voice as truth.

* * *

With Cush’s blessing the two Nephilim slipped into the city of Memphis, Ptah’s capital. They both wore heavy cloaks, their faces hidden in the shadows of their hoods. The houses near the market place were still and shuttered as they slunk past. The common people had retired to bed with the setting of the sun, not able to afford the luxury of illuminating the night, but on the hill above the castle glowed.

The gates to the castle were guarded by several Nephilim but Lucifer and Kokabiel found a darkened stretch of wall. “No one ever looks up,” Lucifer snickered as he hauled Kokabiel aloft.

“Why would they?” Kokabiel replied. “You and your brother were the only ones ever born with wings.” They landed on the palace roof.

“Samael, myself and my newest daughter,” Lucifer corrected with a smile. “She was still red and wrinkled when we left on this campaign but you could already see that she’ll grow into a beauty.”

They dropped to a darkened balcony on the level below then slipped inside to stalk the lonelier halls of the place until they found a servant lighting lamps to guide the God-King’s guests to their rooms.

In a flash Kokabiel was behind the man, his hand over the servant’s mouth and a dagger at the man’s throat. Lucifer put a hand under the man’s chin, guiding him to meet the Nephilim’s gaze. He smiled kindly. “Show us to Ptah’s rooms and I won’t kill you,” he promised as he dug his claws into the man’s flesh lightly.

With a shaking hand the servant pointed down the hall. Kokabiel kept his dagger at the man’s throat until they stood in a grand bedroom. Lucifer looked in the wardrobe then nodded to himself satisfied that they hadn’t been deceived. “I thank you for your lack of loyalty to your king,” Lucifer said as he drew back his fist. Then he frowned in confusion.

“You promised not to kill him,” Kokabiel said. “I’ve told you before that we’re bound by our promises to the humans.” He snapped the man’s neck. “Of course I gave no such oath.” 

“It still seems unreal,” Lucifer replied carelessly. “I suppose I must be naturally disinclined to forswear myself that it surprises me to find that I’m incapable of it even after decades in the Outside world. Put him behind the bed, the body can’t be seen from the door there.” 

Lucifer and Kokabiel waited patiently in the God-King’s darkened chambers until Ptah’s feast ended. They waited in the shadows on either side of the door as the king returned. Then Lucifer slammed the door closed and barred it. Ptah’s guards would break through eventually, they were Nephilim as well, but Lucifer and Kokabiel expected to be done in seconds. Their first clue that something had gone wrong was Ptah blocking Kokabiel’s strike, matching him strength for strength. “You’re one of us!” the silver-scaled Nephilim exclaimed.

“Did you think a mere human could call himself a god and not be toppled for his arrogance?” Ptah laughed as he threw Kokabiel back.

Lucifer stayed near the door. Within the confines of the God-King’s bedchamber his wings were more hindrance than help, a liability that would tangle him in the furniture or get in his ally’s way.

“You’ve enslaved our kind. Why? How?” Kokabiel demanded. “Or are you a mere figurehead? Who is the true ruler of Aneb-Hetch? Who holds your leash?”

Ptah laughed. “Convinced yourself awfully fast. Afraid to admit we can bind each other?” He drew his sword and lunged at Kokabiel as his guards began pounding on the door. “After four or five generations with strong Gehennan-blood you don’t even need to die before the Oaths bind.”

Kokabiel’s attack faltered. “Why?” he demanded. “Why would you enslave your own kind?”

“Look around you!” Ptah exclaimed. “I’m a king, a god! Once the two of your are dead or broken to my will Cush’s people will fall. I’ll rule the world. Who would choose to polish floors in the City over that?”

The door vibrated ominously at Lucifer’s back. He could hear a crowd gathering in the hall outside Ptah’s chambers. In a few minutes, he knew they’d be overrun. His wings twitched. The door hinges bulged and Lucifer threw himself across the room. He caught both Kokabiel and Ptah in his charge and carried all three of them over the balcony. Lucifer’s flight was doomed from the moment of inception. He careened wildly across the sky as he tried to keep the weight of three grown men aloft. Ptah made things more difficult by trying to stab Lucifer, forcing Kokabiel to squirm around as well as he worked to thwart Ptah’s attacks. They cleared the castle way by a hair’s breath and crashed onto the flat roof of one of the lesser dwelling around the market square.

The three of them rolled apart. Ptah immediately tried to leap to the ground. Kokabiel, quick as a snake, cut off his retreat. Lucifer spread his wings wide and blocked all other avenue of escape. Ptah’s eyes darted nervously between the two of them. “You asked who holds my leash,” he said to Kokabiel, “but what you truly want to ask about is your own.”

For a moment Kokabiel’s attention wavered, his eyes flickered toward Lucifer and Ptah darted past him leaping off the roof. Lucifer flew after him. Ptah twisted, he grabbed Lucifer arm as the winged Nephilim dove at him and threw him into a wall. As Lucifer picked himself out of the masonry Ptah hesitated in his retreat. He raised his sword intending to cleave Lucifer’s skull in two. The point of a dagger erupted from Ptah’s throat, drenching Lucifer in a spray of blood. Ptah collapsed, Kokabiel stood on the roof behind him, his arm still raised from throwing his dagger.

Lucifer could hear Ptah’s guards just a few blocks away. He crawled out of the wreckage of the wall then sprang into the air. He grabbed Kokabiel beneath the arms and flew them both to safety. 

“He would have escape if he hadn’t stopped to try to kill you,” Kokabiel remarked as they flew.

“Because him pausing gave you time to make the throw or because him trying to kill me gave you motivation?” Lucifer asked.

* * *

In the greater scheme Ptah’s death didn’t change much. Aneb-Hetch contained too many Nephilim to fall easily. Cush and his son claimed a large amount of their territory while the state was in disarray but eventually it regrouped under Nefertem, Ptah’s son. Kokabiel speculated about whether Nefertem was a puppet-king or continuing his father’s practice of enslaving his own kind, but in practice it didn’t matter. Aneb-Hetch remained a threat and not the only one. New kingdom’s arose to replace those that fell. As the years passed Cush’s mortality became more and more obvious and in time he ceded his throne to his son. 

Kokabiel burst into Lucifer’s chambers. “You can’t do this!” he exclaimed without any prelude. “How many times must I warn you about giving your word!”

Lucifer sighed in annoyance. “It’s a nothing, a formality.”

“You’ll be bound by them, bound to serve them!” Kokabiel protested.

“Of course,” Lucifer agreed calmly. “Just as any retainer is bound to serve his lord. I don’t see the problem. Cush is my friend, his enemies are my enemies. Cush is human, like all of them his time draws to a close. He has become infirm and worries for his son. I’ve watched Seba grow from infancy. I love the boy as much as I do my own children. If it reassures the country and gives Cush peace in his passing to have me swear an unbreakable oath to do as I’ve always done, what’s the harm in it.”

“What’s the harm?” Kokabiel exclaimed in disbelief.

Lucifer turned and gave Kokabiel a serious look. “You’re going to take an oath to Seba as well,” he stated firmly. “It’s only right that my sworn ally should be as dedicated to my cause as I am. In fact, I command it.”

* * *

_“There was a girl of the City who loved high places. One day she and a boy who courted her were out climbing the cliffs that sheltered our valley and she fell. When she fell she was changed. As she lay there, both she and her would-be lover believed her to be dying. Who knows the exact promises exchanged, but I can guess the general gist well enough: Don’t leave me. Trust me. Love me._

_“After the girl recovered the boy noticed a change in her. She was biddable, obedient and he was of a clever mind. In time he formed a hypothesis as to what had befallen her. The scientific method was not unknown to those of the City and so he tested his theory on others and found it sound._

_“In time he took those he’d bound in obedience to himself and left the City. I do not know if he was motivated by fear of discovery or greed for power. I know he left and I know Gehennans are by nature stronger, swifter and more durable than their human counterparts. In time he and his thralls conquered a kingdom._

_“But human minds were sharpened by the necessity of struggling to survive. They were soon to grasp the nature of his advantages over them and how they might gain such advantages themselves. Other parallel stories exist as well and the knowledge spread from a multitude of origin points until it covered the whole of Assiah. The bulk of the fault shifts from one story to another until it doesn’t matter, sometimes it was a human who discovered their capacity for evil first, sometimes it was a demon. It doesn’t matter who was first, it was in all of us._

_“All who have within them the impulse to survive are capable of trampling others in the pursuit of that most primeval goal. When there is a shortage it will happen: Some will be be robbed of their fair share that others might take a large enough share to secure their survival. And some of those who survive will be less bothered by the cost of it than others. Some won’t be bothered at all and will think instead of what else they might acquire by force. We live in a world of finite resources, what you take for yourself another cannot have.”_


	6. Burn

_“I would wonder at you bringing these questions to me, given how little you esteem me. However I have fair notion of who suggested this line of inquiry and you don’t trust him either. Instead you recognize enough of the truth to trust our mutual animosity and hope to find something you can believe in comparing our testimonies. So be it. I am not without responsibilities toward you and it costs me little enough to give you a story._

_“...He comes into the story as well, although late and by coincidence rather than design.”_

* * *

For Satan the first few decades after Eve’s death passed in a blur. He came to himself somewhere at the edge of the world, past the oceans to the point where the walls of Gehenna descended to cup the limits of Assiah in it’s bowl. His hands were a bleeding mess from apparently trying to claw his way out to the Void to whence his beloved’s soul had been condemned. The Presence was observing him. “Why do you come here? Everything you built is back there.”

“Why do you keep me from her?” Satan demanded.

“You reject me. To return to Gehenna proper you must rejoin with me.”

Satan scowled, “You’re blaming me. You made her mortal. You allowed her to die and now you blame me for your walls keeping me from her!” he accused.

“Their physical bodies die to make room for new ones to be born. Their immortal souls rotate between Assiah and the Void so that all may survive. Your mortal died but she will be born again. Why do you tarry here instead of spending the time between caring for what you made with her? The fire that powers your city will burn out if you do not renew it.”

“Why would you care?” Satan asked.

“You are curious creatures. You have grown beyond what you were made to be. The children you create are without precedent. I gave humans the ability to create bodies to house the new souls drawn here by your signal. Angels were never intended to mimic them. It is not simply the bodies that are different when you mate with them, rather than simply creating a housing for the souls you introduce a new element to that soul as well, it is curious.”

Satan struck at the unyielding wall one last time then turned and stalked away. He went back to the City and renewed the fire. When Eve was reborn he would need a place to bring her home to. He resolved that the next time he found her, he wouldn’t allow death to claim her so easily.

Before he left Paimon presented him with the two babies who’d brought about Eve’s death. They’d grown and become children. Despite their opposite coloring, they both resembled Satan rather than their mother: His sharp features and lanky build. His clawed hands. His tail. Satan remembered Eve telling him their names but he’d had more important things to think about at the time and didn’t remember what they were. The three of them stared at each other for several long, uncomfortable minutes then the dark child got up and walked away. The light child followed Satan about the City until he set out again, in fact he had to order the boy back to the City when he found him following him into the Outside world.

As he wandered the Outside world, Satan was at first pleased to see how the human population expanded exponentially. Surely with all these new humans being born it wouldn’t be long before Eve was returned to Assiah. But as the population continued to grow it engendered a new worry: How was he to find his reborn beloved among all these humans? 

Decades passed and Satan still hadn’t found the one human he sought. Peripherally he was aware of those who’d sworn themselves to him returning to the service of man. It annoyed him, but he hadn’t asked for their fealty in the first place and couldn’t be bothered to stir himself as they slunk back to their old positions. Still he took note of the change in their service to mankind. Before men were rendered mortal angels had served as their caretakers, tending their needs and shepherding them away from the consequences of their own foolishness. As the rebelling angels trickled back their service took the shape of nationalistic champions waging war against one another on behalf of the humans they served. 

On one of his sporadic returns to the City, Satan was told his sons had been taken by the humans of the Outside and thus learned that the angels who had returned to the service of man hadn’t necessarily done so willingly. Paimon gave him a very detailed warning about the Oaths, although they weren’t sure that the danger applied to the first generation. After learning that Satan had been more observant when he encountered those from the City in the outside world.

One day as Satan traveled he came across a city. The road leading to it was old and overgrown with weeds. When he approached the city walls a ragged, feral-looking creature attacked him in a frenzy. Blue flames enveloped Satan as he fended off his attacker. With Paimon’s words about the Oaths and how humans obtained them in mind Satan fought defensively. His assailant was little more than a walking skeleton and it wasn’t hard to keep him at bay. Eventually Satan managed to kick the other’s legs out from under him. Then, before the emaciated nephilim could rise, Satan pinned him. “What orders are you bound by?” he demanded.

A deranged grin lit the other’s cadaverous face. “I am bound to protect this place from outside influences,” he said then threw back his head and laughed. “For two hundred years I’ve protected them ever so diligently. I protected them from warriors and travelers and traders alike. Then I reasoned that all who left the city could be corrupted by outside influences and so I killed them as soon as they attempted to return with their corruption. I killed them regardless if they left for a year to travel to other cities or for a day to tend their their sheep or their fields. Then I reasoned further and I realized that the river flowing into the city was an outside influence and so I dammed it. Finally I decided I should protect them from their own folly and so when they tried to leave I drove them back into their city where they were safe from all outside influences.” 

Once he was looking for it Satan saw the intangible chains binding the nephilim to the long dead city. He set the flames cloaking him on the chains, they burned but were not consumed. Still the nephilim left off his hysterical giggling. He looked up at Satan, “I’m so tired,” he said. “No food, no rest. I’m bound to patrol this place without end. I’m driven to kill any bird or beast who approaches. I can’t even unconvince myself so I must maintain the dam. Sometimes I find myself wondering if I should attempt to drive the very air away but I don’t know how so it remains only a passing fancy. Let me rest, I beg you.”

Satan put his hand over the nephilim’s face and in a moment there was nothing left of the wretched creature. The chains, once robbed of their anchor, evaporated into the ether.

As Satan walked away from the dead city and the ashes of it’s guardian/destroyer he discovered that the thought of people who’d sworn themselves to him having the free will they’d wrestled away from the Presence stolen from them by such miserable excuses for humanity stung his pride. It occurred to him that he didn’t like the thought of his sons being treated so but he didn’t remember their faces, it would have been pointless to search for them. Besides he had another goal, but after that, when he cross passed with one of the bound nephilim he made a point of trying to set them free, one way or another. 

Satan learned that, try as he might, he could only rarely destroy the Oath bonds but something changed when he burned them. After he unleashed the blue flames on the chains the bound nephilim were different. Some found ways to slip their bonds, others begged to die, some went mad… And some ran back to their human masters as if Satan were the one they feared. He didn’t understand the cause, couldn’t predict the effect but he continued experimenting, trying to find a way to defeat the Oaths.

Eventually Satan’s endless search brought him to one of the great nations of the young world. A huge crowd of people were gathered in the courtyard before the castle, packing it until it was impossible to breath without bumping into a neighbor. On the lower tier of steps nearly thirty nephilim stood guard, grandly arrayed in fine uniforms, armed with long spears. 

On the upper tier there were four more nephilim, a man with great golden wings and three adolescents, one a girl with wings. There was something about her. Satan started working his way through the packed crowd.

The castle’s great double doors opened and the king stepped out, his young son at his side. In unison the nephilim all dropped to their knees. The people in the crowd bowed their heads but the courtyard was too full for any greater obeisance. The golden-winged nephilim spoke, “The old year passes away and the new year dawns. As the seasons are renewed, I come before you my King, to renew my Oaths to you.”

The girl’s wings were golden, her hair dark and wavy. Making his way through the crowd in the courtyard was no easy feat but Satan had to see her, had to see her immediately. 

“We will unify the world under the rule of the house of Cush,” The older Nephilim paused while the others gathered below him echoed his words. “We are the brave warriors who have risen to the occasion. No matter what the trial we do not go astray. We do not fear death.” 

“I hear your Oath and am grateful for your service,” the king replied. “But I see you have brought before me three who have yet to prove their dedication.”

Satan caught sight of the turquoise gleam of the girl’s eyes, the shape of her face. It was her! It was her, reborn as a nephilim! Satan felt his breath catch in unimaginable joy.

“My sons and daughter,” the winged nephilim said in response to the king. “They are ready to offer you all the proof you could desire.” He stepped forward, offering the first of the two boys his hand. The boy rose, for a moment they stood close together. The older nephilim rested his forehead against the youngers’. “Don’t be afraid,” he murmured in a voice that didn’t carry to the human ears around them. “Just a moment of pain and you’ll be reborn as one of Babylon’s guardians. I love you.” Then he snapped the boy’s neck and lowered him gently to the steps. 

For a moment Satan froze, shocked as realized what the nephilim meant to do to the girl who must be Eve reborn.

The winged nephilim moved on to the second boy, raising him to his feet as he had with the first. “I love you. I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re too human to be bound.” And then, as before, he snapped the boy’s neck, but this boy wouldn’t rise again, the winged nephilim and Satan both knew that. 

‘It will be the girl’s turn next,’ Satan thought in alarm. ‘I’ve waited and searched for her for centuries! I won’t stand by and see her killed.’ He quickly forced his way through the crowd, tossing the humans in the courtyard aside. But once he reached the steps there were thirty nephilim to get in his way. Satan knew he’d make short work of them but it would only take seconds for the girl’s neck to be snapped and he had a faster way. 

Satan gathered the blue flames inside him, focused them, all his determination fixed on destroying the Oath bonds and then sent them forth in a massive pulse, a wave of blue fire that coursed out to the edges of the world in all directions.

* * *

Samael leapt up and hurried across the room as soon as he recognized the man in the door. He pulled up just short of the man and dropped gracefully to his knees, his wings fanned around him like a train. Samael tilted his head down and smiled up at the man demurely, keeping his lips closed to hide his jagged fangs. “You didn’t come back for so long. I feared I’d displeased you.”

The man, Samael wished he could remember his name, stroked one finger delicately over the short, dense coverts, along the top of Samael's wing. The look on the man’s face was one of utter fascination. “I would have been back sooner but your time is expensive.”

Samael pouted. “I’ll talk to Lilith,” the forth, he added mentally. “Ask her to make allowances for you. But I fear it will do little good. She only cares for money, not what I want.”

‘As highly in demand as I am, you’d think I could keep myself satisfied,’ Samael thought, but his expression only showed adoration for the man standing in front of him. ‘But Lilith IV just has to go and set our prices to keep us all in a constant state of withdrawal. Her ancestor wasn’t such a stingy bitch. After the first time SHE trusted me to get the job done without being half-starved for it.’

The man grew bolder, he stroked the glossy indigo-black outer feathers, then burrowed his fingers into the layer of down beneath. Samael’s eyes fell shut as he moaned. Letting his head fall forward, he shifted his wings to grant better access. His mind fractured to answer conflicting demands: To drown in ecstasy. To become the man’s every desire. 

The ones who fixated on his wings were the best. While a client was present he’d be overcome with pleasure, regardless of what they did to him so long as they enjoyed it, but after they’d gone it was a different story. The ones who were obsessed with his wings rarely did anything that left him hurting once they’d gone, taking their intoxicating desire with them. They were also, in Samael’s experience, the least likely to return once they’d had the chance to indulge their curiosity. He’d have to ask Eisheth the man’s name afterwards.

Fissions of electricity swept through him, making him shake as the man murmured, “You are so beautiful,” as he watched Samael’s feathers slide through his fingers. Samael leaned into the man, resting his cheek against the other’s hipbone and sighing softly. “We should make the most of every moment we have to together,” he suggested. The man nodded eagerly and Samael rose to his feet, tugging the man after him to one of the larger backrooms where he could spread his wings without turning the room into a claustrophobic nightmare. As soon as they were through the door, Samael knelt again. He was tall and his clients liked looking down on him. 

Samael loosened the ties over his shoulders that held his tunic in place. The man seemed sufficiently fixated on Samael’s wings to continue stroking them until Lilith kicked him out. But while the man’s current level of bedazzled fascination was building a low burn of arousal in Samael’s belly, it wasn’t enough to satisfy the craving left from days of deprivation. Also, he couldn’t know when his next opportunity to get his fix would come, especially if Lilith took it into her head to punish him. He nuzzled and mouthed at the man’s crotch, loosening the fastenings on the other’s clothes until the man was thinking as much about his dick as he was Samael’s wings.

Samael allowed himself to be pulled up and pushed on to the bed. He spread his wings around him, the discomfort of lying them was completely overwhelmed by the lust in the man’s eyes as he took in the picture Samael had created. Samael had inherited the sharper features that had become his father’s after the Satan claimed the Blue Flames as his own, he wasn’t classically beautiful the way the angels had been, but the contrast between his pale skin and the iridescent dark wings spread beneath him was stunning. He’d rarely been allowed outside in the past seven hundred years for fear of darkening his complexion.

The man hesitated for a moment, enthralled. Then he crawled onto the bed. Samael arched needily up into the weight pressing down on him. The waves of desire were starting to hit harder, take him further, he was getting to point where he just wanted to let go and become nothing more than the need to be used. But with an inexperienced partner who was visually fixated, Samael knew he still had to arrange the mechanics. He reached above him to wrap his hands around the sturdy bar at the head of the bed, being mindful to keep his palms down so his claws were kept hidden. Samael’s instincts told him that this one would be put off by reminders of how very dangerous a nephilim could be if not for the bindings wrapped so tightly around his every desire and action. 

Samael tightened his grip until his knuckles turned white, knowing that he’d keep holding on like that even when the pleasure took him completely. Once, long ago, when he hadn’t yet adjusted to the intensity of his body’s reaction he’d accidentally clawed a client. When Lilith had had him whipped a week later it had been a relief, her punishment had been the only thing that had freed him from the punishments he’d been driven to inflict on himself. Samael didn’t trust the current Lilith to understand the bindings on him well enough to keep him from tearing himself apart should he ever fail to satisfy their demands. 

“Whatever you want,” Samael encouraged, pulling his legs in up to his chest. It didn’t take long for the man to shove inside him.

A wave of blue flame washed over the room, and in fact, the world. 

For a moment the man stopped and stared, but Samael’s body was tight and hot around him. The nephilim was shivering beneath him in a way that went straight to his dick. He dismissed the briefly appearing blue flames as nothing more than a hallucination.

Samael shook. The overwhelming, mind-blowing high from being used was gone. All it left behind was sex with an insipid partner. For the first time he was able to fully recognize the horrific pull of the massive chains layered on him, to see it undistorted by the command to welcome enslavement. For the first time in nearly a millennia his will was uncontested, his thoughts unconstrained by the desire of others. Samael could feel the driving need to make his client happy but derived no pleasure from submitting to the need because he knew it wasn’t what he wanted. There was suddenly, painfully, a clear line between what Samael wanted and what others wanted of him.

On top of him, his client was nearing climax. It occurred to Samael that no one had ever bothered to order him not to kill his clients. Oh it was understood to be included in the generic ‘make them happy’ command… But they never stayed happy. The pleasure using his body brought them was fleeting. ‘In fact, he’ll be more unhappy than he was before he met me in a day or two,’ Samael reasoned. ‘Desperately scheming as to how he can manage to get his next fix. I’m as much an addiction to him as his kind are to me.’

The man threw his head back and shouted as he came. Samael reached up and sliced the man’s jugular open with his claws. Blood rained down on Samael, drenching him and for a moment he smiled to himself. Boaz and Abner were centuries dead but this was close enough, he was finally able to act on his last desire that was fully his own. Then Samael convulsed beneath the man’s dying body. The chains on him tightened and something gave; Samael knew it was him that had broken, not the chains.

Later, when the agony faded, Samael pushed the cooled body off of him and rolled to his feet. He didn’t doubt that something in him had been irreparably torn asunder but he felt the chains remaining on him were less constricting, more easily shifted to counterbalance one another.

Samael walked out into the hall. He leaned against a door jam for a moment and watched as Naamah took the strings she’d torn from the harp she played so well and fashioned them into a noose. For a moment her eyes met his across the open foyer. “I can feel them pulling me back,” she said. “I’m still not free. Not yet.” Then she dove over the balcony. The narrow string of the noose held her for a heartbeat then, under the weight of her body, it cut deep into her neck, her head popped off and her body crashed to the ground leaving the bloody noose swinging empty.

Samael applauded her ingenuity. With their regenerative abilities dying wasn’t easy. Even so he wasn’t willing to win his freedom in such a pyrrhic fashion. After all, Lilith’s promise to him had been broken. She’d promised that he would be happy if he were good and, by her twisted definition, he had been very, very good but he was not happy. Lilith needed to be punished for breaking her promise to him. He could feel broken promise leading him straight to her. He kicked down the door to Lilith’s private rooms. Before she could say a word he pressed a hand firmly over her mouth. Holding her tightly against his chest Samael bent his head to whisper in her ear. “Little Lilith, I’ve been thinking,” he murmured.

Lilith squirmed helplessly. He felt her heart pound and smiled.

“For generations I’ve been passed along like some sort of family heirloom, but your ancestor didn’t take quite the same care when it to passing on her, well, frankly limited, understanding of my kind.” Samael chuckled darkly. “Still she understood me better than you do. Foolish little Lilith, playing with dangerous toys and you didn’t even know it.”

“All these years you’ve hobbled my mind, put blinders on my thoughts, swamped my reason with emotions, feelings, that you imposed on me. But all this time I’ve still been here. Even with all the power you’ve held over me you weren’t able to resculpt the very core of me.”

“When I was first brought here Lilith knew so much more than I did about what I was,” Samael’s grip tightened until pained, inarticulate whimpers slipped out from beneath his hand and tears welled up in Lilith IV’s eyes. “She used my ignorance against me without a hint of mercy. But I’m not so ignorant now. The blinders are off, the hobbles burned away by those lovely blue flames.” Samael relaxed his grip fractionally and continued in an almost conversational tone. “Everything I’ve seen in the past seven hundred years and now I’ve the clarity of mind to put it together. I think I’d have enjoyed telling Lilith where she went wrong. But, as she’s gone, I suppose you’ll have to do… Poor copy that you are.”

“Lilith assumed it was all on me, that I was created to lack free will and that the best I could have done, had she not gotten her claws into me first, would have been to find someone trustworthy, as my father and his followers did. To turn my autonomy over to someone who wouldn’t hurt me at least.”

Samael shook his head. “It’s not so simple Little Lilith. Your ancestor promised me things and YOU have failed to deliver. My mind was so choked with alternating need and physical pleasure that I couldn’t see it, didn’t know to look for it, but the bonds on me are frayed, I can see that now. Silly girl, you didn’t keep your word and because you didn’t I am now free.”

“And I am not happy Little Lilith.”

Lilith IV bit the hand over her mouth, drawing blood, almost taking a chunk of flesh out of Samael’s palm. He nuzzled her ear, making a gentle tsking noise. “Is that supposed to hurt Little Lilith? Thanks to you and your ancestors my pain/pleasure response is so thoroughly fucked-up I just can’t tell.” He shifted his hold on her, kneading her breast roughly. “I could return the favor, teach you how fine a line exists between pleasure and pain. I already know your body so well, Little Lilith. It would be so simple to take all control of it from you, as you did to me.”

Lilith fought his hold on her, desperation and terror showing nakedly in her eyes, to no avail.

“Mmm, do make it more tempting,” Samael purred. Then he straightened, his hold on her became impersonal. “On second thought, as intoxicating as the smell of your fear is the notion of sleeping with you again, even as an act of vengeance, revolts me.” 

“You broke your promises Little Lilith, it is only fair that I should break something in return. Your neck for example.” Samael waited for several moments, letting his words sink in. Then, when he judged that Lilith’s terror had peaked, he snapped her neck like a twig.

Samael promptly doubled over, crashed to his knees beside the body, retching up blood. His wings beat at the air, spastic, uncoordinated movements that smashed furniture and his own bones without differentiation. When the fit passed Samael slowly collected himself. “I suppose… her broken promise… did not… exactly… balance the promises… coerced… from me,” he murmured haltingly. Leaning heavily against a wall he levered himself up to his feet and staggered out the door.

Samael glanced back at Lilith’s body, he wiped the back of his hand over his lips. “Oh well… It was… worth it.”

* * *

As the blue flames washed over him, Kokabiel woke from the dream of loyalty he’d been held under for centuries. The renewed oath to unify the world under the rule of Cush and his descendants still rang in his ears but he knew he felt nothing but loathing for them. 

Several yards away, Lucifer collapsed to his knees staring between his hands and his forever-dead son, one of many over the years. Experience had taught them to recognize those that were too human to be bound practically from the moment of their birth but none-the-less Lucifer had subject every one of his children to the test. Those that were too human to be bound, were still more than human and too much a threat if left free.

Kokabiel saw Satan break free of the crowd and began forcing his way up the steps. The other nephilim quickly shook off the shock of the blue flames and moved to oppose him. They’d been born and raised breathing loyalty to Babylon and Cush’s family, for them the Oath changed nothing, it only solidified everything they been taught was true. It didn’t matter that it was thirty to one, Satan was smashing his way through the nephilim, tossing them about like sticks caught in a tornado. 

When it became apparent that Satan would be triumphant, Cush’s grandson Raamah and great-grandson Havilah began to retreat toward the castle and suddenly Kokabiel knew how they could be free. The very thought of it made him quiver, Kokabiel didn’t doubt that his Oath would claim a toll from him, but it was the House of Cush he was sworn to, not any particular member of the House. While the rest of the guard were occupied with Satan, Kokabiel drew his dagger. He flipped it, then threw. Then knife took Raamah in the throat. As the king collapsed, blood gushing from his mouth, so did Kokabiel. 

The king’s death snapped Lucifer out of his fugue. “Murderer!” he cried as he sprang up to attack his long time retainer, but it was no battle. Kokabiel was choking on blood, it ran from his mouth, nose, eyes and ears. Lucifer forced Kokabiel to the ground, his hand locked around the silver-scaled nephilim’s neck. 

Kokabiel only grabbed Lucifer’s tunic and pulled him closer, “My loyalty to you was real,” he gasped. “This is a chance to set things right. Marry Istahar to Havilah. Join the House of Cush to your house. Fulfill our Oath by ruling this land as their regent.” Kokabiel turned toward Lucifer’s slain son, “Don’t let them keep killing us,” he said as the light left his eyes. Lucifer shivered as his attention was drawn back to his son.

“Daddy!” Istahar shrieked as Satan wrapped an arm around her, pinning both her arms and wings. He started hauling her away.

Lucifer’s gaze darted wildly between Kokabiel, Raamah, his sons, one dead forever and one just beginning to revive, and Istahar, struggling against Satan. “Father, what are you doing?” Lucifer asked, seeing the panicked look in his daughter’s eyes.

“What am I doing?” Satan roared. “You’d kill your mother again after I’ve searched for her for so long?”

* * *

_“Lucifer-ni and I never quarreled over who our father loved best. That would have been utterly pathetic in the face of overwhelming evidence that he didn’t love us at all. Does that answer… Not the questions you’ve been primed to ask but the one you haven’t dared to ask?_

_“Although… It might be possible that you do arouse some measure of affection in him. You do look so very much like your mother. Hmm. If I didn’t know for a fact that your mother’s spirit lingers in this realm I might feel obligated to worry for you. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s become confused. Gender isn’t always maintained between incarcerations you realize.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Before anyone else mentions it, I'm messing up the Biblical timeline. There's just not a whole lot to play with when it comes to what led up to the Great Flood. There's Genesis 6:4 which mentions Nephilim right before the flood story starts and some interpretations take that to be causal. But if "Sons of God" is interpreted to be Angels who married women and the Flood was intended to get rid of their offspring (the really out there interpretations of the Bible are the best for plot-bunny generation) then the part about "Wickedness of the human race" in 6:5 seems to contradict any notion that non-human elements motivate the Flood.
> 
> So there's only a general statement about humans being evil and not many memorable stories happening between Cain's and Noah's. But reading ahead a bit there's Noah's great grandson Nimrod and the tower of Babel. Which I've been avoiding direct references to because a) it's after the flood and b) I have specific plans for a Tower of Babel type story. But additional research into something more obscure to call Cush's kingdom turned up Nubia… So Babylon it is.
> 
> I've also been avoiding calling the city where Samael is being held Sodom or Gomorrah because that's ten generations after Noah.
> 
> Ptah is one of Egyptian mythology's creator Gods. The odd man out IMO, Atum, Amun and Ra all seem pretty similar in how they go about things. I'm just using him as a name because I prefer the Atum version of the story for later use.
> 
> Kokabiel is a fallen angel, name translates to "Star of God". With Lucifer being the morning star I thought sticking with the star theme for his retainer was good.
> 
> Istahar is a woman who caused an angel to fall out of lust for her in Jewish folklore, the Angel told her God's true name to impress her, she used it to fly up to the heavens and escape him becoming one of the Pleiades. The angel was then unable to return to the heavens and became one of those to sire nephilim.

**Author's Note:**

> Genesis 4:23-24 (NIV): Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”


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